Automated Airspace Separation Assurance
(The problem is how to keep airplanes separate from each other during
flight... an abstract will follow).
See you all there, I hope,
Luca
'Advanced Airspace Concept(AAC) is a recently proposed and approved
method for handling air traffic. It includes many hard subproblems in
areas such as flow management, safety analysis and robustness,
interface with pilots and air traffic controllers, weather avoidance,
and many more. Myself, Professor William Dunbar(UCSC), and Professor
Heinz Erzberger(UCSC/NASA) are working on the automation of separation
assurance between airplanes. Currently, aircraft separation is mostly
maintained by air traffic controllers and pilots. Since safety is a
priority, there is a decided limit to the amount of air traffic
allowed per airspace sector. These limits cannot be improved unless
airspace separation is handled by a deterministic and safe computer
algorithm. We have thus far concluded a cooperative, procedural, and
leader-based algorithm will provide safe solutions to the separation
problem, while also interfacing well with the human air traffic
controllers and pilots. Some challenges include designing leader
decision logic, providing a way for explicit cooperation to be used by
the algorithm to help solve the problem, and which events to remember
and how long to store previous events in memory.'