Conformance Monitoring Approaches in Current and Future Air Traffic Control Environments

Abstract

Conformance monitoring is a core task in Air Traffic Control (ATC) operations to determine whether aircraft are adhering to assigned trajectories. This is important for many reasons, including to ensure that tactical collision avoidance maneuvers are properly executed; strategic conflict detection & resolution schemes are valid and security around sensitive locations is maintained. In today’s ATC environment, controllers monitor for conformance via radar systems that primarily provide positional information. As a result, non-conformance criteria are generally based on positional deviations from the assigned trajectory [1] or penetration of restricted airspace such as the No Transgression Zone (NTZ) on PRM approaches [2]. Future ATC surveillance systems such as Automatic Dependant Surveillance (ADS) should provide access to additional aircraft state information which could be used for more effective conformance monitoring. However, at present there is a lack of clear rationale for which states should be surveilled and how they would be used to enable conformance monitoring to be performed at a level appropriate for future operational requirements. This paper describes a framework for this purpose that poses the conformance monitoring task as a model-based fault detection problem.