Sustaining trajectory flexibility for air traffic complexity alleviation

Abstract

Despite the fact that several Air Traffic Management (ATM) complexity metrics have been proposed in the past few years, very few of these studies incorporate a control independent intrinsic approach to the problem with the aim of sustaining trajectory flexibility. This paper proposes the introduction of novel decision making metrics for sustaining user trajectory flexibility. The hypothesis is, if all aircraft apply a flexibility preservation function, complexity may reduce automatically. The functions proposed combine concepts of adaptability, robustness and intrinsic traffic complexity metrics based on Lyapunov exponents. Adaptability is defined as a measure of the ability of the aircraft to change its planned trajectory in response to the occurrence of a disturbance that renders the current planned trajectory infeasible. The Robustness metric is defined as the ability of the aircraft to keep its planned trajectory unchanged in response to the occurrence of disturbances. An Intrinsic complexity measure is used to evaluate the level of disorder with regards to the aircraft trajectory; disorder is defined in this context as the level of consistency in the flow patterns of aircraft and their proximity. A point mass model for multiple aircraft(s) is used to extract the trajectories and computing a form of characterisation of sensitivity and interdependencies of a set of aircraft trajectories. Lyapunov exponents are used to compute this measure. The main contribution of this paper will be to test the hypothesis by combining the complexity metrics described above. Different operational scenarios are simulated using a airspace environment developed in MATLAB which shows how well the traffic is structured by varying the metrics defined. The simulation shows the efficacy of the metrics to alleviate complexity in a heavily congested airspace.