Infrastructure development for ground-based separation assurance with optional automation

The increasing volume of traffic in the air transportation is leading to excessive workload on air traffic controllers. Developing automated air traffic management (ATM) tools is a critical technology for reducing the workload of air traffic controllers and hence increasing the airspace capacity. The existing approaches to automated ATM either use overlysimplified air traffic and aircraft dynamics models to reduce computational complexity or end up being computationally intractable for large scale ATM scenarios. Our previous work presented a new hybrid system description of modeling the decision process of the air traffic controllers in en-route and approach operations. The emulation of air traffic controller decision process in the hybrid model provides realistic conflict resolution maneuvers in 3D, while being computationally tractable. This work builds upon the developed automated separation assurance algorithm, and investigates the application of the algorithm on real flight data and the integration with avionics systems. The algorithm is validated on the real flight plan data for the Istanbul region extracted from the ALLFT+ dataset provided by EURO-CONTROL, which includes over 7000 flights in a 96-hour period. The developed algorithm is also integrated into a Boeing 737-800 flight deck simulator with a custom radar display and additional human in the loop simulations are ran to demonstrate the applicability of the developed approach to existing avionics systems.