Air Traffic Management Concepts Research Articles

Automation in Future Air Traffic Management: Effects of Decision Aid Reliability on Controller Performance and Mental Workload

Future air traffic management concepts envisage shared decision-making responsibilities between controllers and pilots, necessitating that controllers be supported by automated decision aids. Even as automation tools are being introduced, however, their impact on the air traffic controller is not well understood. The present experiments examined the effects of an aircraft-to-aircraft conflict decision aid on performance and mental workload of experienced, full-performance level controllers in a simulated Free Flight environment. Performance was examined with both reliable (Experiment 1) and inaccurate automation (Experiment 2). The aid improved controller performance and reduced mental workload when it functioned reliably. However, detection of a particular conflict was better under manual conditions than under automated conditions when the automation was imperfect. Potential or actual applications of the results include the design of automation and procedures for future air traffic control systems.

Through the Lens: A New Approach to Decision Modeling under Free Flight

Air traffic management (ATM) concepts of the future are committed towards significantly enhancing the capacity and making flying even safer. Since, these new ATM concepts will change the roles and responsibilities of pilots and the air traffic controllers, it is important that their impact on safety be evaluated. Many proposed schemes includes shifting the separation assurance function (maintaining safe distances between aircraft) to the cockpit from ground based air traffic control, and to assign a supervisory role to the air traffic controller, who would make decisions in exceptional cases. Some initial research in this direction has shown that controllers cannot intervene effectively without decision support tools like “conflict probes”. Furthermore controllers and pilots have different strategies for resolving conflicts about separation and airspace. Accordingly, there is a need to better understand and classify the decision-making behavior of different agents in the future proposed ATM system. This paper presents a theoretical discussion outlining the application of the Lens Model of Brunswik to provide insight into some of the research questions posed in conflict detection and resolution by future ATM concepts. We illustrate the approach through an example case study.

Sector-Less Air Traffic Management: Initial Investigations

In the near future, modern communication technologies, together with satellite-based navigation and surveillance technologies, will enable aircraft to be monitored and controlled without necessarily relying on traditional radar-based practices. Based on this assumption, we present a new Air Traffic Management (ATM) concept that dispenses completely with today’s principle of sectorisation. Our work explores the possibility of controlling and monitoring aircraft individually, with no regard to today’s sectors through which aircraft fly.In this paper we discuss the concept referred to as “Sector-less Air Traffic Management.” This concept proposes a radical change in the way we traditionally control air traffic: instead of having, say, two controllers controlling a sector containing n aircraft, one controller will be responsible for a limited number of m aircraft, from departure to arrival terminal areas (TMA). It is believed the proposed concept will go a long way towards solving the current conflicting requirements for capacity, safety, and efficiency in the context of today’s continuous growth in air traffic.

Designing for safety: the ‘free flight’ air traffic management concept

Abstract This paper describes the conceptual design and validation of an air traffic management (ATM) concept and the role the safety and human factors played in this design and validation process. The free flight (FF) concept is characterised by being a direct route concept where the pilots, instead of the air traffic controller, are responsible for the separation assurance. Moving this task to the cockpit has consequences for the man machine interface in the cockpit, which needs to be modified to accommodate this new task (micro level design). On top of that, a set of rules and procedures are required to ensure an efficient and safe traffic flow (macro level design). Both the micro and macro aspect of this design are intertwined and require an accurate tuning to arrive at an overall acceptable solution. Both micro-level (flight simulator) experiments and macro-level (traffic simulations) experiments have been conducted to investigate the feasibility of this concept after optimising the initial conceptual design.

Distributed Air/Ground Traffic Management for En Route Flight Operations

Distributed Air/Ground Traffic Management (DAG-TM) is a detailed instantiation of the Free Flight concept, formulated to serve as a foundation for NASA’s long-term research on advanced air traffic management concepts. Potentially revolutionary methods of air traffic management will be necessary to achieve the mature state of Free Flight. DAG-TM is a human-centered operational concept that seeks to minimize the impact of air traffic management constraints by leveraging new procedures and technological innovations in automation aids, information sharing, and supporting technologies. Under the DAG-TM paradigm of operations, flight crews, air traffic service providers (controllers), and aeronautical operational control personnel (flight planners/dispatchers) utilize distributed decision-making to maximize user flexibility and system throughput. This paper introduces the DAG-TM concept and provides a detailed description of the en route concept elements; the main purpose is to disseminate the DAG-TM concepts to the air traffic management community, and to motivate further exploration.

Realising the concept: more autonomous - aircraft in the future ATM system

The More Autonomous - Aircraft In the future Air Traffic Management System aims to realise key elements of the new Air Traffic Management concept as a critical step towards increasing the capacity of European airspace and reducing air transport delays.

FACET: Future ATM Concepts Evaluation Tool

FACET (Future Air Traffic Management Concepts Evaluation Tool) is a simulation and analysis tool developed at the NASA Ames Research Center. This paper introduces the design, architecture, functionalities and applications of FACET. The purpose of FACET is to provide a simulation environment for exploration, development and evaluation of advanced Air Traffic Management concepts. FACET models system-wide airspace operations over the contiguous United States. The architecture of FACET strikes an appropriate balance between flexibility and fidelity, enabling it to model the trajectories of over 5,000 aircraft on a single desktop computer running on any of a wide variety of operating systems. FACET has proto-types of several advanced Air Traffic Management concepts: airborne self-separation; a decision support tool for direct routing; advanced traffic flow management techniques; and the integration of space launch vehicle operations into the U.S. National Airspace System.

Evaluating Cost-Effectiveness of an Air Traffic Management System for Europe: Development and Application of Methodological Framework

In response to growing air transport congestion, new air traffic management (ATM) concepts have been put forward to ameliorate existing problems. By their nature, ATM systems are highly complex, and their development and implementation require substantial financial resources. Moreover, the introduction of a new ATM system generates tangible as well as intangible benefits and costs. Therefore, a methodological framework capable of addressing all specific characteristics of the ATM system cost-effectiveness evaluation should be developed. The objective of this paper is twofold: first, to develop a methodological framework for evaluating the TORCH system (i.e., a new ATM concept for Europe), and second, to present the results of the application of the proposed framework for assessing the cost-effectiveness of the TORCH system. The proposed methodology was applied with the help of a panel of European ATM experts. The application results are intuitively appealing and indicate a strong convergence of the expert opinions concerning the most preferable ATM system. More specifically, the results of the evaluation suggest that an investment in TORCH will improve the safety, operational, and environmental performance of the ATM system as well as the working conditions of the air traffic controllers, and at the same time, the TORCH system will be marginally cost-effective.

The future functionalities of the flight management system

The availability of new Communication, Navigation and Surveillance technologies provides the basis to move towards advanced Air Traffic Management (ATM) concepts. Some of these concepts will impact the airborne Flight Management System (FMS) by introducing new functions with different flight time horizons. In this discussion, two main flight time horizon are defined: The tactical flight time horizon is between 30s and 10mn ahead of the aircraft current position. Airborne separation from traffic, terrain and adverse weather will be introduced in this time horizon as a tactical function. The strategic flight time horizon is more than 10mn ahead of the aircraft current position. Weather datafusion, enroute inflight replanning assistance and air-ground trajectory negotiation will be introduced in this time horizon as strategic functions. The organisation of the associated future flight management system can be synthesised in the scheme (figure 1). The data to be displayed to the pilot for his flight awareness are functions of the flight phase, the type of airspace and of the type of situation encountered. Globally these data can be shared as functions of their flight time horizons, and their topic, as it is described in the table below. In the cells are indicated the flight objects that these data address. SEXTANT as a major avionics manufacturer is leading research and development activities in the area of ATM related airborne flight management functions. Their existing or expected findings are described in this article.

The Experimental Flight Management System: Advanced Functionality to Comply with ATC Constraints11This is the third of a series of articles from the PHARE program, which is described in “What is PHARE?” published in ATCQ, Volume 2, Number 2, 1994.

The experimental flight management system (EFMS) project is part of the Programme for Harmonised Air Traffic Management Research in EURO-CONTROL (PHARE). The main objective of this project is to provide all PHARE partners with a common experimental flight management system that enables them to conduct research into advanced air-ground integrated air traffic management concepts. A phase 1 version of the EFMS has been developed, comprising the functionality required for the conduct of both enroute and terminal maneuvering area experiments, planned within PHARE on air-ground negotiation of four dimensional (4-D) trajectories. The EFMS has already been integrated into three research aircraft and two simplified flight deck simulators used for air traffic control (ATC) simulations. The initial version of the EFMS has the capability to predict a 4-D trajectory according to a set of constraints given by an ATC planning computer. It negotiates this trajectory with ATC via data link and it generates guidance commands for the autopilot/autothrottle system to steer the aircraft along the negotiated trajectory. This article describes the role of the EFMS within the PHARE program; the funtionality of trajectory prediction is described and results from initial flight trials are given. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.