A Data-driven Framework for Long-Range Aircraft Conflict Detection and Resolution

Abstract

At the present time, there is no mechanism for Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) to probe new flight plans filed by the Airlines Operation Centers (AOCs) against the existing approved flight plans to see if they are likely to cause conflicts or bring sector traffic densities beyond control. In the current Air Traffic Control (ATC) operations, aircraft conflicts and sector traffic densities are resolved tactically, increasing workload and leading to potential safety risks and loss of capacity and efficiency. We propose a novel Data-driven Framework to address a long-range aircraft conflict detection and resolution (CDR) problem. Given a set of predicted trajectories, the framework declares a conflict when a protected zone of an aircraft on its trajectory is infringed upon by another aircraft. The framework resolves the conflict by prescribing an alternative solution that is optimized by perturbing at least one of the trajectories involved in the conflict. To achieve this, the framework learns from descriptive patterns of historical trajectories and pertinent weather observations and builds a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Using a variant of the Viterbi algorithm, the framework avoids the airspace volume in which the conflict is detected and generates a new optimal trajectory that is conflict free. The key concept upon which the framework is built is the assumption that the airspace is nothing more than a horizontally and vertically concatenated set of spatio-temporal data cubes where each cube is considered as an atomic unit. We evaluate our framework using real trajectory datasets with pertinent weather observations from two continents and demonstrate its effectiveness for strategic CDR.