Abstract

Safety assessment of new air traffic management systems is a main issue for civil aviation authorities. Standard techniques such as testing and simulation have serious limitations in new systems that are significantly more autonomous than the older ones. In this paper, we present an innovative approach for establishing the correctness of conflict detection systems. Fundamental to our approach is the concept of trajectory, and how we represent a continuous physical trajectory by a continuous path in the x-y plane constrained by physical laws and operational requirements. From the model of trajectories, we extract, and formally prove, high-level properties that can serve as a framework to analyze conflict scenarios. We use the AILS (Airborne Information for Lateral Spacing) alerting algorithm as a case study of our approach. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

Current and future air traffic is requiring new procedures and systems to achieve a greater automation and efficiency of the air traffic operations. On controlled air space and airports, centralized ATC support the real time complexity of air traffic management. But on non-controlled aerodromes, used mainly by general aviation, the absence of ATC support may limit the increase of this type of air traffic. General aviation aircraft fly under VFR and only when weather and visibility conditions are good. Their flight is the closest approach to free flight new concept but without the technological support of avionics to make decisions. An aeronautical radio and a GPS are in most cases their available technologies on board. This paper proposes an air-air negotiation protocol for general aviation approaching an aerodrome without ATC. The technological requirement of the protocol is the aeronautical radio enhanced with an ACARS avionics. A fast decision making algorithm is proposed to solve landing time requests based on changes in speed and on the use of a same landing procedure. The protocol has been tested for several scenarios involving up to ten aircraft with satisfactory results. Document type: Conference object

Abstract

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) are currently being used primarily for military applications, but with the evolution of avionics technology, a huge market in civil applications is emerging. However, most civil applications require UAS to access non-segregated airspace. Current use limitations of non-segregated airspace make it extremely difficult to extensively evaluate operational concepts and mission profiles. Using real flights to test the complete UAS mission infrastructure involves costs and risks. Therefore, simulators must be used prior to real flight campaigns to test and validate UAS components and must take into account all the actors involved in the non-segregated airspace. This paper describes the development of a Software-in-the-Loop simulator called ISIS+ to evaluate the automated operations of UAS in non-segregated airspace and to test new software components of the UAS with other avionics components. The ISIS+ simulator provides a realistic simulation environment in which the UAS software components can be developed under real air traffic scenarios while taking into account all the UAS's peculiarities. The UAS is integrated with eDEP, an air traffic simulation environment, in order to explore the UAS behavior, conflicting traffic and air traffic controllers' requests with the airspace actors. The integration is carried out using ADS-B messages and considers the UAS as an active actor in the networked environment to simulate future SESAR and NextGen scenarios. Peer Reviewed