A Proposal for Collaborative Navigation in Air Corridors

• João Marcelo de Castro Monteiro
• Felix Mora-Camino

Agência Nacional de Aviação Civil - ANAC · MAIAA, ENAC the French Civil Aviation University

Event

XVI SITRAER – Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil, October 25–27, 2017

Volume

Proceedings of XVI Air Transportation Symposium (SITRAER) · ISSN 2448-1912

Pages

783–784

Publisher

Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ/COPPE)

Editors

Fabio Krykhtine

Abstract

With the expected huge increase in air traffic over the next decades, it is believed that a large proportion of traffic will be organized in main air streams operating under advanced CNS procedures. Many studies and proposals of solution for a future congested ATM are developed and presented in many scientific events and magazines, and one of the most considered is known as "Flow Corridors". In order to enable this type of traffic flow, with minimal or no interference at all of controllers, the airplanes must follow certain traffic specifications of the corridor and be able to maintain self separation and surveillance of the inside traffic. In such environment, self-controlled dense traffic, the navigation should be based on accurate and reliable systems throughout the entire corridor. The current study aims to present a collaborative method to take advantage of the many measurements from surrounding airplanes to improve their navigation performance. For the purpose of this study, it is understood that collaborative navigation is characterized by the utilization of measurements performed by surrounding aircraft and exchanged to improve the navigation performance of the each of them. Said in another way, an airplane surrounded by other airplanes should experiment a better navigation performance than an aircraft flying alone. The main objective of this study is to assess the possibility of using TCAS and ADS-B signals, already made available in commercial aircraft, as means to improve navigation performance. To improve navigation performance, an aircraft may use the information of distance between itself and other airplanes provided by TCAS, since the estimation of the absolute position of each airplane is available (ADS-B), and to create a dynamic constellation similar to GPS where the satellites are replaced by the surrounding airplanes. In this situation, instead of having the ephemeris with the satellite position we have an ADS-B message with the aircraft position and instead of measuring the distance aircraft-satellite using the satellite clock and received message time, we use the TCAS to measure the distance between aircraft. The challenges of this approach are not only the level of uncertainty of each measurement system, but also the lack of synchronization between measurements. The mathematical model to be used in this study is similar to the one used for GNSS positioning applications, with a slight difference adopt