Abstract

The following work will be aiming to investigate the level of how the airspace is being operated under the current conditions and propose the most appealing way to be implemented in order to meet the requirements of capacity increase. Air Traffic Management operates a set of services aiming primary at ensuring safety of flights. The services in Europe are provided by various ATM systems, including controllers, control centers and airports, managing approximately of 30000 daily flights and providing aircraft separations, collision preventing and providing information. The assuring predictions made for the year 2030, is estimated for Air Traffic to double. If nothing will be done we are to be expected, flight cancellations, missed connections and negative impact on safety. Traffic growth cannot be sustained with the current divided air navigation services organization and some ageing ATM technologies. It must be recognized that the air transport must be grown in a sustainable manner, where the future of European ATM system will cope with expected growth in air Traffic. There is a need for one simplified European framework to cope safely with the increased demand. Hence a new Air Traffic Management System is required for the benefit of the European Sky. The possible solutions for the traffic management is provided by SESAR, the goal of which is to enable EU skies to handle 3 times more traffic, improving safety of flights and decreasing of ATM cost and cost per flight. The creating of change of change in European ATM will demonstrate the ability to deliver benefits to the Air Transport community. A performance-based approach will be used for the development of the future ATM system, with common objective: to handle up to three times more traffic than today and decrease in ATM cost per flight. (by 2020) The area navigation and navigation performance specifications have to be globally harmonized for a set of Performance Based Navigation, which defines the performance requirements for aircraft navigation within the Air Traffic Service route. By simulating the possible outcome for the future planning, we will look into how or which of the ways is more attractive to be applied in order to meet the requirements of increasing capacity, in the airspace field. For this we will use Nest desktop application, used by the EUROCONTROL, for airspace structure design and development, preparing scenario for fast and real time simulation. Nest is a scenario-based tool, where we can make changes to the original dataset scenario to model an unlimited number of different operation planning options, also to generate future traffic samples using traffic growth forecasts provided by STATFOR (Statistics and Forecasts). Data will be taken from the Demand Data Repository project, objective of which is to provide airspace users with the a potential accurate outcome of the past and future European air traffic demand, to meet their planning and monitoring needs.

Abstract

This report describes the implementation of an airspace complexity server into the preindustrial prototype of the Extended ATC Planner. First, there is the description of the current ATC en-route control room situation, with a presentation of the different actors and their roles. Then, a study of the multi-sector planner (EAP) is made, focused on the frame of the new SESAR operating method. The third part of the report deals with the airspace complexity. It is defined, then the algorithms are detailed and its applications for the EAP are justified. Finally, there is the description of the airspace complexity implementation in the EAP prototype. The platform and complexity server architectures are presented, simulations and results are analysed and future improvements are proposed in order to continue the project later on.

Abstract

The RPAS have become the new airspace users, which introduces a significant change into the ATM world. In order to support this change, the RPAS integration should be done by simulating real scenarios with the aim to maintain the same safety level like before their integration. Initiatives like Base of Aircraft Data (BADA) bring to the table all the necessary data to enable complete and accurate trajectory predictions by means of creating Aircraft Performance Models (APM). This project is focused on the modelling and consequently APM creation of two RPAS. Along it, the process followed and the results obtained are ex- plained, considering the lack of available data. Furthermore, a trajectory predictor (BTP) has been performed allowing all kind of trajectories simulations and the obtaining of impor- tant parameters such as altitude, thrust, fuel,etc. It is necessary to remark that the BTP has played an important role in the validation of the models created. On the one hand, many conclusions have been obtained in the end of the process, letting the demonstration that the APMs created show acceptable errors in comparison to the NASA real telemetry. On the other hand, the BTP fulfils the error limits in comparison to the EUROCONTROL TP, ensuring accurate and reliable results.

Abstract

decade ago, the SESAR programme was launched. SESAR aims to restructure of the European Air Traffic Management (ATM) through new infrastructure, systems and procedures inside a lesgislative European framework which will cover the future air traffic demand. One of the concepts borned with SESAR is the Dynamic Sectorization, where any necessary segregation is temporary, based on real-time usage within a specific period. The project focuses in the ACC of Barcelona West Airspace, which its maximum traffic demand is produced in summer, and the capacity is limited in the peak hours, causing the application of regulations, hence delay, almost in a daily basis in some of its sectors. This project covers an assessment based on the viability, benefits and inconveniences of two new possible configurations proposed by Enaire, the Air Navigation Service Provider in Spain, which are based in the FUA concept. For that, real air traffic samples are used from the months of July and August of 2015, and the configuration are simulated with EUROCONTROL NEST tool. The first configuration studies the possibility to rise the vertical limit between two sectors (Levante Upper, Levante Lower) from FL325 (3250 ft.) to FL345 (3450 ft.). The second configuration studies the possibility to incorporate temporary segregations between three sectors (Ponent 1 Upper, Ponent 1 Lower, Ponent 2) through the creation of two subsectors between them with the goal of joining them with the existing ones based on the traffic. Results show that in the first configuration the global conditions of capacity and saturation would be of the same order of magnitude, but having some benefits. The second configuration does not show any improvement with neither of the solutions provided, due to the capacity problem is focused in the airspace zone where the adaptable sectors have been created.

Abstract

The ability to meet a controlled time of arrival during a continuous descent operation will enable environmentally friendly and fuel efficient descent operations while simultane- ously maintaining airport throughput. However, if the wind fore- cast used to compute the initial trajectory plan is not accurate enough, the guidance system will need to correct time deviations from the plan during the execution of the descent. Previous work proposed an on-board guidance strategy based on model predictive control, which repeatedly updates the trajectory plan in real-time from the current aircraft state and for the remainder of the descent. However, the wind conditions downstream, at altitudes not explored yet, were difficult to predict due to the lack of data. This paper shows the potential benefits of using wind observations, broadcast by nearby aircraft, to reconstruct the wind profile downstream. The wind profile in the trajectory opti- mization problem is modeled as a spline, which control points are updated to fit the observations before re-planning the trajectory. Results from simulations using realistic wind data show that the performance of model predictive control significantly improves when including up-to-date wind observations, in terms of time and energy errors at the metering fix and fuel consumption. Peer Reviewed