Flow-Capacity-Maintaining, Decoupled Conflict Resolution Procedures for Air Traffic Control

Abstract

This research addresses the design of automated provably-safe en-route Conflict Resolution Procedures (CRP) for Air Traffic Control (ATC). The main issue in ATC today is to deal with the increasing workload on air traffic controllers. Automation can be widely used to reduce controller workload for controllers and to improve performance, e.g, to avoid capacity loss causing delays due to adverse weather. However, proving safety of automated CRPs has been challenging due to substantial computational effort and complexity with large number of aircraft and conflicts in the ATC system. Towards a provably-safe CRP, this thesis develops automated CRPs that satisfy conditions for guaranteed solution. In particular, this thesis addresses three issues: (i) account for aircraft turn dynamics, (ii) resolve conflicts on non-perpendicularly intersecting routes with different speeds, and (iii) account for on-demand activation and deactivation of the CRP.