Graceful Degradation of Air Traffic Operations

TL;DR

This paper explores how air traffic operations can degrade gracefully under system failures, proposing new algorithms and analysis to ensure safety and performance even in degraded conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a quantitative framework for assessing traffic configurations' ease of graceful degradation and a new conflict resolution algorithm for degraded surveillance scenarios.

Findings

Some traffic configurations are easier to handle during degradation.

Quantitative measures can predict the ease of graceful degradation.

A new conflict resolution algorithm improves safety during surveillance failures.

Abstract

The introduction of new technologies and concepts of operation in the air transportation system is not possible, unless they can be proven not to adversely affect the system operation under not only nominal, but also degraded conditions. In extreme scenarios, degraded operations due to partial or complete technological failures should never endanger system safety. Many past system evolutions, whether ground-based or airborne, have been based on trial-and-error, and system safety was addressed only after a specific event yielded dramatic or near- dramatic consequences. Future system evolutions, however, must leverage available computation, prior knowledge and abstract reasoning to anticipate all possible system degradations and prove that such degradations are graceful and safe. This paper is concerned with the graceful degradation of high-density, structured arrival traffic against partial or complete surveillance failures. It is shown that for equal performance requirements, some traffic configurations might be easier to handle than others, thereby offering a quantitative perspective on these traffic configurations. ability to "gracefully degrade". To support our work, we also introduce a new conflict resolution algorithm, aimed at solving conflicts involving many aircraft when aircraft position information is in the process of degrading.