Analysis of Automated Aircraft Conflict Resolution and Weather Avoidance

This paper describes an integrated solution to traffic conflict detection and resolution with weather avoidance in the Center-TRACON Automation System. An automatic conflict resolution algorithm developed and tested to resolve aircraft-to-aircraft conflicts is modified to reroute aircraft around convective weather constraints while avoiding traffic conflicts. The approach extends algorithms which resolve aircraft-to-aircraft conflicts to also resolve aircraft-to-forecast weather conflicts. Alternatively, a separate algorithm that solves aircraft to weather conflicts would have to be integrated with the current method to solve both aircraft and weather conflicts. This evaluation limited conflict resolutions to horizontal maneuvers due to software limitations in the research software that are being addressed. Simulation results show 96 percent of aircraft-to-aircraft conflicts without any weather constraints were successfully resolved. In high traffic scenarios with moderate weather, 91 percent of conflicts were resolved, while in high traffic with bad weather 72 percent of conflicts were resolved.