Performance Evaluation of Terminal Airspace System Safety, Delay and Predictability of Muritala Mohammed International Airport, Ikeja Lagos, Nigeria

This paper outlines a multi-dimensional user-oriented performance metrics approach in evaluating the operation of the terminal airspace system to aid in the airport and airspace planning and decision making. Safety, delay and predictability metrics contribute to the analytical framework. From the findings, the occurrence of air incidence has a high severity level at departure, and arrival phases of flight, higher likelihood at the radar room and much of the incidences were as a result of faulty equipment and inherent absence of modern airspace infrastructure. Also, in Lagos terminal airspace, the number of incidences has no close correlation with the level of traffic complexity. Total schedule arrival delay ranges from 1 - 392 minutes representing an average of 7.8 - 17.9 minutes per aircraft that arrived Lagos airport at that period. Besides, the total approach contact time ranges from 1 - 57 minutes, translating to 4.6 - 7.1 minutes per aircraft. However, variability in arrival time of 1 - 5 minutes is common from published airline arrival scheduled time. In the same vein, the variability of 1 - 5 minutes is common from approach contact times of aircraft. These figures indicate sound arrival predictability signature for Lagos airport. Also, departure time variability above 30 minutes is familiar from the ATC clearance time for the various routes under study. However, there is about or more 25% variability of more than 15 minutes, and this indicates possible inconsistency of predicting departure times from the times Air Traffic Control (ATC) clearance was acquired. Above all, the predictability of departure times in Lagos airport is weak compared to those of the arrival. Taken by it, this may be a sign of airspace congestion or ATC deficiencies at the Lagos airport. This is an indication of the lack of users’ confidence in Nigeria’s air transport industry to deliver just-in-time service.

Beamforming of Whole Airspace Phased Array TT&C System Based on Linear Subarrays

The whole airspace phased array telemetry,track and command(TT&C)system is regarded as the development tendency of next generation TT&C system,and the distribution of the antenna units and the beamforming technology have sparked wide interest in this field.A method for antenna distribution is proposed based on the linear subarrays technology.A symmetrical truncated cone conformal array is composed of the linear subarrays placed on the generatrix.The impact of truncated cone bottom radius and elevation angle on beamforming are studied and simulated.Simulation results verify the system design.

Design of Simulation System for Effectiveness Evaluation of Future Airspace Window Shooting

Future Airspace Window Shooting is a newly developed technology, which needs effectiveness evaluation before widely used. Future airspace window shooting technology, simulation system development principles and software chosen to develop the simulation system are introduced in the first. And then the overall design of the system, realization of the system and effectiveness evaluation through simulation are discussed in detail. Through the simulation, it is known that the FAW shooting has more superior performance when facing maneuvering targets.

AIRCRAFT FLIGHT SAFETY ANALYSIS IN LOW ALTITUDE AIRSPACE

The low altitude airspace will be open in China, general aviation flights are tremendously increased. Whether aircrafts can fly safely and how to determine the requirements of safety flight are the problems needed to be confirmed. Under this circumstances, based on the international Civil Aviation Organization（ICAO） criteria and the standards made by CAAC, this paper adopts the ＂See and Avoid＂ principle. Under the binding conditions of flight rules, visibility requirements, responding time, the aircraft speed, circle banking angle or the climbing angle, based on its study on aircraft dynamics principles, this paper establishes a mathematical collision avoidance model for head-to-head traffic and crossing converging traffic at the same level. And the safety separation requirements of the aircrafts in low altitude flight are equantitatively analyzed. Finally, the Matlab software is used to analyze the above method. The result shows that the safe traffic avoidance of the converging traffic at the same level meets certain flight conditions, while intersecting the traffic at the same level can safely avoid the collision.

AUCTIONING METHOD FOR AIRSPACE CONGESTING RESOURCE ALLOCATION AND GAME EQUILIBRIUM ANALYSIS

The airspace congestion is becoming more and more severe.Although there are traffic flow management（TFM）initiatives based on CDM widely applied,how to reschedule these disrupted flights of different airlines integrating TFM initiatives and allocate the limited airspace resources to these airlines equitably and efficiently is still a problem.The air traffic management（ATM）authority aims to minimizing the systemic costs of congested airspaces.And the airlines are self-interested and profit-oriented.Being incorporated into the collaborative decision making（CDM）process,the airlines can influence the rescheduling decisions to profit themselves.The airlines maybe hide the flight information that is disadvantageous to them,but is necessary to the optimal system decision.To realize the coincidence goal between the ATM authority and airlines for the efficient,and equitable allocation of airspace resources,this paper provides an auction-based market method to solve the congestion airspace problem under the pre-tactic and tactic stage of air traffic flow management.Through a simulation experiment,the rationing results show that the auction method can decrease the total delay costs of flights in the congested airspace compared with both the first schedule first service（FSFS）tactic and the ration by schedule（RBS）tactic.Finally,the analysis results indicate that if reallocate the charges from the auction to the airlines according to the proportion of their disrupted flights,the auction mechanism can allocate the airspace resource in economy equitably and decrease the delay losses of the airlines compared with the results of the FSFS tactic.

Research on Operation of UAVs in Non-isolated Airspace

In order to explore the safe operation of UAVs in non-segregated airspace,a collision risk model for cylindrical UAVs based on conflict areas was constructed and the risk of conflict between manned and unmanned aerial vehicles was researched.According to the results of risk analysis,a strategy for solving the conflict of aircraft is proposed,and the risk assessment experiment of unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)in non-isolated airspace conflict is carried out.The results show that under the experimental conditions,large unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with ADS-B,TCAS and other airborne sensing systems will indeed interfere with other aircraft in airspace when they enter non-isolated airspace.Especially when the number of aircraft in airspace is large,the automatic avoidance system of UAV will increase the avoidance time and trigger the safety alarm,but the safety level is still acceptable.This indicates that it is relatively safe for UAVs to enter non-isolated airspace under limited conditions.The results can be used as a reference for the safe operation of unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)in non-isolated airspace.

ESTIMATION METHOD OF AIRSPACE CONNECTIVITY PROBABILITY IN MILITARY AANET

Connectivity is the premise and foundation of networking and routing.For the probabilistic flight path of military aircraft resulting in the difficulty of Aeronautical Ad hoc NETwork(AANET) research,an estimation method of connectivity probability is proposed.The method takes airspace as the research object,starts with actual flight characteristics,and applies conclusions of random waypoint mobility model.Building a connectivity model by establishing Airspace Unit Circle(AUC) from the perspective of circle-circle coverage,the method obtains a theory of airspace network connectivity.Experiment demonstrates its correctness.Finally,according to the actual condition simulation,relationship between the number of aircraft,communication radius,and the flight area under connectivity probabilities is achieved,results provide reference for creating a network that under certain aerial combat condition.

Analysis on Potential Conflict Frequency of Intersected Air Routes in Terminal Airspace Design

In order to obtain accurate conflict risks in terminal airspace design,the concept and calculation model of potential conflict frequency for intersected routes are proposed.Conflict frequency is represented by the product of horizontal conflict frequency and vertical conflict probability.The horizontal conflict frequency is derived from the probability density distribution of conflicts in a period of time.Based on the recorded radar trajectory data,the concept and model of ROUTE distance are proposed,and the probability density function of aircraft height at a specified ROUTE distance is deduced by kernel density estimation.Furthermore,vertical conflict probability and its horizontal distribution are achieved.Examples of three intersected arrival and departure route design schemes are studied.Compared with scheme 1,the conflict frequency values of the other two improved schemes decrease to53% and 24%,respectively.The results show that the model can quantify potential conflict frequency of intersected routes.

Design Issues for Use of Solid State Transmitter Radars in the Terminal Airspace

Abstract

Dynamic airspace sectorization via improved genetic algorithm

This paper deals with dynamic airspace sectorization （DAS） problem by an improved genetic algorithm （iGA）. A graph model is first constructed that represents the airspace static structure. Then the DAS problem is formulated as a graph-partitioning problem to balance the sector workload under the premise of ensuring safety. In the iGA, multiple populations and hybrid coding are applied to determine the optimal sector number and airspace sectorization. The sector constraints are well satisfied by the improved genetic operators and protect zones. This method is validated by being applied to the airspace of North China in terms of three indexes, which are sector balancing index, coordination workload index and sector average flight time index. The improvement is obvious, as the sector balancing index is reduced by 16.5 %, the coordination workload index is reduced by 11.2 %, and the sector average flight time index is increased by 11.4 % during the peak-hour traffic.

Optimization of a Route Network in Dakar Airspace: Surface Navigation

In this paper, the map of a network of air routes was updated by removing the non-optimal routes and replacing them with the best ones. An integer linear programming model was developed. The aim was to find optimal routes in superspace based on performance-based navigation. The optimal routes were found from a DIJKSTRA algorithm that calculates the shortest path in a graph. Simulations with python language on real traffic areas showed the improvements brought by surface navigation. In this work, the conceptual phase and the upper airspace were studied.

Dynamic reconfiguration for en-route airspace

As the air traffic demand is anticipated to be increased significantly in the near future,dynamic and effective allocation of the airspace resource is becoming a world-wide focus in the research field of air traffic management（ATM）.Taking the U.S.targeting the en-route airsapce,a dynamic airspace configuration（DAC） algorithm to reconfigure the airspace in consideration of higher efficiency and safety is presented.First,a modeling technique based on graph theory is proposed to generate a mathematical model for the airspace,and then,the graph model is partitioned into subgraphs for the purpose of sectorizatoin.The final step generates sector configuration with desirable geometry shape.Through analysis on the Cleveland airspace center（ZOB） in the U.S.,the algorithm is proved to be robust to time-varying traffic load.

Convective Weather Avoidance Prediction in Enroute Airspace Based on Support Vector Machine

With the rapid growth of global air traffic,flight delays are increasingly serious.Convective weather is one of the influential causes for flight delays,which has affected the sustainable development of civil aviation industry and became a social problem.If it can be predicted that whether a weather-related flight diverts,participants in air traffic activities can coordinate the scheduling,and flight delays can be reduced greatly.In this paper,the weather avoidance prediction model(WAPM)is proposed to find the relationship between weather and flight trajectories,and predict whether a future flight diverts based on historical flight data.First,given the large amount of weather data,the principal component analysis is used to reduce the ten dimensional weather indicators to extract 90%information.Second,the support vector machine is adopted to predict whether the flight diverts by determining the hyperparameters c and γ of the radial basis function.Finally,the performance of the proposed model is evaluated by prediction accuracy,precision,recall and F1,and compared with the methods of the k nearest neighbor(kNN),the logistic regression(LR),the random forest(RF)and the deep neural networks(DNNs).WAPM’s accuracy is 5.22%,2.63%,2.26%and 1.03%greater than those of kNN,LR,RF and DNNs,respectively;WAPM’s precision is 6.79%,5.19%,4.37%and 3.21%greater than those of kNN,LR,RF and DNNs,respectively;WAPM’s recall is 4.05%,1.05%,0.04%greater than those of kNN,LR,and RF,respectively,and 1.38%lower than that of the DNNs;and F1 of WAPM is 5.28%,1.69%,1.98%and 0.68%greater than those of kNN,LR,RF and DNNs,respectively.

Chronic airspace disease:Review of the causes and key computed tomography findings

Chronic airspace diseases are commonly encountered by chest,body or general radiologists in everyday practice.Even though there is significant overlap in the imaging findings of different causes of chronic airspace disease,some key clinical,laboratory and imaging findings can be used to guide the radiologist to the correct diagnosis.The goal of this article is to review and compare these features.

An Improved AOMDV Routing Protocol for Airspace Communication Network

The airspace communication network based on spacecraft has a wide range of applications in regional information enhancement and emergency communication. In this paper, a routing algorithm for congestion degree detection of multipath routing (CD_AOMDV) is proposed. The method of combining the whole congestion degree detection and local congestion degree detection before service initiation is adopted. Timely and accurate judgment of the congestion degree reduced the loss rate of the hot nodes, so the average packet loss rate reduced. Simulation results show that compared with the traditional AOMDV protocol, the CD_AOMDV proposed in this paper has reduced the packet loss and improved delay performance, which is more suitable for the airspace communication network.

停机位分配的多商品网络流模型及离散粒子群算法

本文建立了停机位分配的多商品网络流模型,并以航空器总场面运行时间最小为目标,建立数学模型。将机场场面分为若干区域,建立区域—机位两级分配策略,以降低问题规模。设置机位外等待时间,以省去区域容量相关约束。在传统粒子群算法的基础上,设计离散粒子群算法,对模型进行求解。选取乌鲁木齐机场某日240架航班和109个机位进行实验,证明了与现有研究中的典型模型相比,多商品网络流模型能使运算时间减少10.1%,并能达到与典型模型相同的精度。全空域和机场模型(total airspace and airport modeller,TAAM)仿真结果表明,和现行机位分配方案相比,多商品网络流模型的机位分配结果能使航空器的场面调配运行时间减少7.49%,延误时间减少8.87%。算例结果进一步表明,提高机场场面运行效率的关键在于均衡航班的进离港滑行距离,同时避免停机位密集分布。

The exploration and practice of low-altitude airspace flight service and traffic management in China

Due to the inherent nature of being highly digitalized,networked and intelligent,Unmanned Aerial System(UAS)operations pose a huge challenge to traditional aviation regulation and technical systems.How to keep safe,efficient and integrated operation for different Airspace users has become a pressing issue faced by civil aviation around the world.This paper focuses on the main operational scenarios and characteristics of unmanned aviation development in China.New operational characteristics and associated challenges due to diverse low-altitude users are analyzed,including operation concepts,UAS traffic management,technological test and verification,and standards.Drawing light on the practices in Europe and the United States,this paper summarizes China's practices and progress in low-altitude operations management,and analyzes future technological development needs and trends,as well as feasible implementation pathways and measures based on actual needs.

FLIGHT CONFLICT DETECTION AND RESOLUTION

The air traffic control (ATC) systems are facing more and more serious congestive because of the increasing of air traffic flow in China. One of the most available ways to solve the problem is 'free flight' that the pilots may choose the air route and flight speed suitable for them. But this will lead to the difficulties for the controllers. This paper presents how ATC genetic algorithms can be used to detect and to solve air traffic control conflicts in free flight. And it also shows that this algorithm perfectly suits for solving flight conflicts resolution because of its short computing time.

基于改进Dijkstra算法的滑行路径优化

为了减少大型繁忙机场场面拥堵与航班延误,对处于机场终端区的航班进行预先战术性的滑行路径动态优化。首先,对处于机场终端区的航班划分时间窗口,对航班集合进行分类,使用改进Dijkstra算法对需要路径优化的航班进行动态规划。改进Dijkstra算法是将整个时间进程分成多个连续滚动的时间片,在每个时间片中,以场面节点的时间当量长度总和最小为优化目标,采用传统Dijkstra算法思想,获得每个航班的最优滑行路径解。其次,在TAAM(total airspace and airport modeller)仿真软件中利用Matlab编程实现算法,并以实际机场为例验证算法正确性。实验结果证明:改进Dijkstra算法能有效减少滑行冲突,提高滑行效率,缩短机场航班延误时间。

低空救援实时飞行的冲突探测与解脱算法研究

航空器冲突探测和解脱的实时计算对航空救援飞行安全意义重大。基于低空目视飞行规则,构建三维空域网格,采用时间窗理论分析了两航空器同高度飞行的时空冲突判定方法。依据救援目视飞行规则和航空器飞行性能约束,建立航空器Agent的可行路径集和基于网格划分的Airspace模型,并根据航空器Agent的救援任务属性确定了优先级判定准则,对各个Agent模型在冲突顶点上的优先级进行判定。建立两航空器无冲突最优路径规划方法,计算Agent的无冲突路径。通过仿真验证,分析了飞行冲突的时间窗和区域,以及优先级下的无冲突路径,结果表明,本方法相对于非协作的冲突探测和解脱方法可以有效提高解脱效率,节约飞行时间146s。