An expert system for generating terminal area flight paths for arriving aircraft

Abstract

Air-traffic congestion and frequent saturation of major airports require improved Air Traffic Control procedures to make the flow of traffic more uniform and increase system capacity. Advanced technologies allow an increased aircraft controllability that makes trajectory planning feasible. A computerized Flight Path Generator for Air Traffic Control has been designed and is described herein. This tool is intended to aid controllers in their decision-making process for guiding aircraft to the runway before landing. The flight path generation program has been developed in the form of an Expert System in a Prolog and Lisp environment. A computationally tractable symbolic representation framework for aircraft motion in space is introduced. Several Artificial Intelligence techniques are combined to design a planner, based on partially predefined sequences of actions involving mathematical descriptions, such as movement in space with a time requirement. The adequacy of an Expert System to develop new flight approach procedures and adaptive separation criteria is highlighted. Symbolic conflict detection and resolution are presented as an extension to the Flight Path Generator in an Expert System environment.