Runway incursion alert using knowledge rules

A runway incursion is a situation where two or more aircraft or vehicles occupy one runway simultaneously and as such create a potentially dangerous situation. We can think of many situations where two aircraft/vehicles occupy the same runway simultaneously, but do not cause a conflicting situation, e.g. two taxiing aircraft on a closed runway or a departing aircraft lining up behind a landing one. From the current increase of simultaneous aircraft movements and an increasing use of intersecting runways and runway crossings, there is a large potential for conflicts and a need for tower controller decision support in surveillance and monitoring. A Runway Incursion Alert tool enables ground movement capacity to be optimised, while maintaining safety. In this paper, we present an advanced Runway Incursion Alert (RIA) tool, based on mode-of-flight tracking and as such taking into account the observed status of aircraft and other moving vehicles. The conflict detection function is Knowledge Based so that it can reason about active and inactive runways and takes into account the status of the aircraft. Detected conflicts will be displayed on an overlay of the airport lay out. A separate window will pop up, to contain additional conflict information. Tower controllers are given the capability to acknowledge conflicts. A prototype demonstration of the proposed RIA function has been built.