Flight deck centered tactical 4D trajectory planning and collision avoidance with flight envelope sampling

The future flight deck will need additional avionics and operational procedures which involve adaptive algorithms and advanced decision support tools, considering the transformation of redefining existing roles in ATM technologies. These tools should also meet the requirements of the future flight operations defined in NextGen and SESAR 2020+ visions. Following this line of thought, the main purpose is to develop a theoretical framework for both intactical 4D trajectory planning and collision avoidance problems of an aircraft equipped with automated tools, which in turn can almost achieve free flight. The proposed approach in 4D trajectory planning involves recent algorithmic advances in both probabilistic and deterministic methods, in order to fully benefit from the powerful and useful capabilities of both approaches. Furthermore, we have constructed an aircraft performance model based on BADA 4 so as to generate trajectories. The multi-modal approach for the aircraft model is utilized to overcome the problem of the complex optimal trajectory generation via reducing the dimension. The sampling-based algorithm embeds this local trajectory generation procedure and guarantees asymptotic optimality under certain conditions. Moreover, a cross-entropy method has been integrated to enable highly efficient sampling. We have also formulated the collision avoidance problem as a perfect-information zero-sum differential game, as well as introduced a sampling-based procedure integrating sampling-based motion planning algorithms to generate feasible approximate solutions. Finally, different scenarios have been simulated, and pilot interactions with the integrated B737-800 Flight Deck Testbed deployed in ITU ARC have been demonstrated.