First results on flight rules and conflict avoidance maneuvers for a sectorless ATM concept

Abstract

The idea of sectorless ATM (Air Traffic Management) envisages the airspace as a whole instead of dividing it into sectors. The dismissal of sectors, however, necessitates the definition of a complete and unambiguous set of flight rules in order to regulate which aircraft has to introduce an avoidance maneuver in case of a conflict. This paper describes the research on flight rules conducted within DLR's research project on sectorless ATM and describes the developed rule set in detail. Since in a sectorless concept only one specified aircraft amongst the ones in conflict is responsible for the conflict resolution different kinds of avoidance maneuvers than nowadays are necessary. This paper specifies the avoidance maneuvers that have been developed for automatic conflict resolution by DLR's traffic simulator. In particular, vertical conflict resolution often combines horizontal and vertical avoidance to allow for inaccuracies of the vertical movement and trajectory prediction. The conflict resolutions are also offered as suggestions to the controller, who can either choose one of them or develop his or her own solution. It is debated why for short and medium-term conflict resolutions the automatically generated solutions might seem more sensible or efficient than for long-term conflict resolutions. It is explained that in long-term situations the system can be able to analyze situations more thoroughly than the controller. The discussion elaborates on possibilities to implement and apply these findings in a sectorless ATM concept.