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European Air Traffic Flow Management with Strategic Deconfliction
Abstract
In the European Air Traffic Flow Management, en-route conflicts between aircraft may be avoided strategically. One option for strategic deconfliction is the allocation of alternative departure-timeslots. To find the best slots for all flights, we solve a Binary Integer Problem. In this problem, each flight is associated with linear delay costs and a departure condition. Furthermore, flights have to satisfy sector and aerodrome capacity constraints. Since conflicts involve at least two flights, there is a coupling between variables. Each potential conflict is modelled by a linear constraint, which assigns conflict costs by setting a conflict variable. However, conflict constraints of lp-relaxed variables do not trigger their conflict costs. Therefore, branch-and-bound nodes do not contain costs for relaxed conflicts, which weakens lower bounds. With a conventional solver, the deconfliction of a full-day of European air traffic takes approximately one hour. To reduce the computation times of the Network Flow Environment (NFE), we extend the pricing algorithm to perform deconfliction. This method of column generation is initiated with only a subset of possible departure-timeslots and includes more slot-options iteratively. Promising variables with reduced costs are discovered by pricing dual variables. Conflicts increase dual departure costs and thereby boost the search of alternative departure-timeslots for conflicted flights. The column generation method reduces computation times for the optimal solution of a problem with over twenty-five thousand flights by more than eighty percent.
... Strategic Deconfliction [21] approaches usually focus on pre-flight stratagem intending to either improve airspace utilisation or improve the likelihood of decreased en route conflict states between aircraft agents. Generating routes that have been strategically deconflicted with other proposed routes, as in [22]- [25], can make efficient use of the available airspace, reducing the number of en route conflict states through adapting routes around areas of high concentrated traffic flow. ...
... This approach naturally accounts for the spread of the aircraft in the simulation occurring from uncertainty in the initial position and external effects such as wind. To demonstrate this approach, if there are recorded three active waypoints out of the N = 100 aircraft in the environment (w α , w β , w γ ) ∈ W, with the distributions as (25,71,4), then simulation run to t d will start with new aircraft approaching the aforementioned waypoints following the distribution (w α = 25, w β = 71, w γ = 4) respectively. ...
In the UAM space, strategic deconfliction provides an all-essential layer to airspace automation by providing safe, preemptive deconfliction or assignment of airspace resources to airspace users pre-flight. Strategic deconfliction approaches provide an elegant solution to pre-flight deconfliction operations. This overall creates safer and more efficient airspace and reduces the workload on controllers. In this research, we propose a method that constructs routes between start and end nodes in airspace, assigns a contract of operational volumes (OVs) and ensures that these OVs are sufficiently deconflicted against static no-fly zones and OVs of other airspace users. Our approach uses the A* optimal cost path algorithm to generate the shortest routes between the origin and destination. We present a method for generating OVs based on the distribution of aircraft positions from simulated flights; volumes are constructed such that this distribution is conservatively described.
... Schuster and Ochieng (2014) carried out a detailed analysis of performance requirements of future Trajectory Prediction and CD & R tools within SESAR and NextGen. A strategic deconfliction method for European Air Traffic Flow Management was proposed by Jan Berling et al. (2015). To enable strategic deconfliction, a proposed flight path is evaluated against points of other flight paths for breaches in the separation minima. ...
... Route planning and re-planning can be encompassed in strategic deconfliction but with a greater emphasis on re-planning for conflict resolution. Operating either spatially in threedimensional (3D) space or temporally as well in 4D space, strategic deconfliction systems, such as [23]- [25], can provide deconflicted routes where the probability of near mid-air collisions is reduced pre-flight. ...
Strategic pre-flight functions focus on the planning and deconfliction of routes for aircraft systems. The urban air mobility concept calls for higher levels of autonomy with onboard and en route functions but also strategic and pre-flight systems. Existing endeavours into strategic pre-flight functions focus on improving the route generation and strategic deconfliction of these routes. Introduced with the urban air mobility concept is the premise of operational volumes. These 4D regions of airspace, describe the intended operational region for an aircraft for finite time. Chaining these together forms a contract of finite operational volumes over a given route. It is no longer enough to only deconflict routes within the airspace, but to now consider these 4D operational volumes. To provide an effective all-in-one approach, we propose a novel framework for generating routes and accompanying contracts of operational volumes, along with deconfliction focused around 4D operational volumes. Experimental results show efficiency of operational volume generation utilising reachability analysis and demonstrate sufficient success in deconfliction of operational volumes.
... Within this study, a simple conflict detection component for UAM (component 11 in Figures 6 and 8) was derived from the Network Flow Environment (NFE) Conflict Detection Tool [67,68]. The tool detects conflicts between planned trajectories (see Section 3.6) based on different urban air traffic concepts and separation standards (toolinput from component 2). ...
The current push in automation, communication, and electrical energy storage technologies has the potential to lift urban mobility into the sky. As several urban air mobility (UAM) concepts are conceivable, all relevant physical effects as well as mutual interrelations of the UAM system have to be addressed and evaluated at a sufficient level of fidelity before implementation. Therefore, a collaborative system of systems modeling approach for UAM is presented. To quickly identify physical effects and cross-disciplinary influences of UAM, a pool of low-fidelity physical analysis components is developed and integrated into the Remote Component Environment (RCE) workflow engine. This includes, i. a., the disciplines of demand forecast, trajectory, vertiport, and cost modeling as well as air traffic flow and capacity management. The definition and clarification of technical interfaces require intensive cooperation between specialists with different areas of expertise. To reduce this communication effort, the Common Parametric Aircraft Configuration Schema (CPACS) is adapted and used as central data exchange format. The UAM system module is initially applied for a 24-hour simulation of three generic networks in Hamburg City. After understanding the basic system-level behavior, higher level analysis components and feedback loops must be integrated in the UAM system module for evaluation and optimization of explicit operating concepts.
... Other techniques for collaborative conflict resolution may regard user-preferred trajectories. Narrowing down the search space is paramount due to computational resources limitations, therefore storing reference trajectories and defining sampling neighborhood for solution sets are also a matter of concern [12] [13] for conflict resolution. ...
Implementation of Trajectory Based Operations (TBO) has been updating the structure of the advanced Air Traffic Management (ATM). Although several methodologies for conflict detection and resolution (CDR) have been developed to the aviation community, the legacy problem is to find an efficient scheme to present the trajectories in this complex network with massive data and further to detect and resolve the conflicts. In this research we develop a CDR framework based on the management of predicted 4D-trajectories using a Not Only SQL (NoSQL) database and local search algorithms for conflict resolution. This paper describes the architecture and algorithms of the proposed solution in 4-Dimensional Trajectory (4DT). With the application of Trajectory Prediction (TP) simulator using the Brazilian flight plan database, the results from case study show the effectiveness of the proposed methods for this sophisticated problem in ATM.
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