1 A Trajectory Prediction Tool to Support Air Traffic Management

In the mainframe of a project for the autonomous determination of best aircraft flight paths to avoid in-flight conflicts, SELEX Sistemi Integrati S.p.A. developed a bi-dimensional, i.e. altitude and distance, aircraft trajectory prediction tool that was enough accurate to support Air Traffic Management requirements with minimum processing load. Indeed, it is expected that this tool should be called hundreds of time per second by the main Air Traffic Management system in order to select best trajectories. The Aerospace System Group at the Department of Aerospace Engineering of the Università di Napoli “Federico II was funded by SELEX Sistemi Integrati S.p.A to provide support for this project by means of proper selection of aircraft dynamics models that could be adequate to meet the above mentioned requirements. Some project constraints were assigned to the system so that it would be adequate for real-time operation of conflict resolution routines. It must be capable to accurately track the performance status of aircrafts during all typical transport aircraft flight phases such as takeoff, climb, cruise, descent, and landing. Regarding the aircraft dynamics representation, the system was based on a customized version of the Total Energy Model that turned out as an efficient point-mass model. Moreover, the tool had to be easily upgradable in case new aircrafts were added in the airspace. For this reason, the Base of Aircraft Data developed by EUROCONTROL was adopted as reference. The paper describes tool architecture and results of performances compared to other assessed non real-time Trajectory Prediction software systems