UAV Collision Risk Assessment in Terminal Restricted Area by Heatmap Representation

Abstract

The frequent intrusion of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into civil aviation airports poses a severe challenge to the safety management of the airport. The subsequent flight delays and even the closure of the runway have seriously affected the normal operation of the airport. To measure the collision risk of the Unmanned-Manned (U-M) encounter (intruding UAV to manned aircraft), a collision risk assessment platform is developed in this paper to predict the U-M encounter collision risk of the airport restricted area. The designed platform can be used to dynamically generate 3D trajectories of the U-M encounter, and to assess the collision risk with the changing of the relative distance in the probabilistic curve. Further, to predict the collision risk of the airport restricted area, the collision risk heatmap representation is then introduced. A case study of Changi Airport, Singapore is employed to generate the runway collision risk heatmap based on the designed collision risk assessment platform. The results demonstrate how the collision risk of the separate runway and the integrated runway distributes.