Collision risk modeling and analysis for lateral separation to support unmanned traffic management

This article investigates the utility and extension of well-established collision risk modeling approaches for lateral separation standard development for unmanned traffic management and network design. The applicability of standard assumptions and simplifications made in the manned environment to a scaled-down unmanned aerial systems (UAS) environment is first investigated. The results are used to derive an iso-risk surface that shows the tradeoff between separation distance and navigation performance for a given risk level or target level of safety. The model is then extended to consider collision risk from one to (Formula presented.) tracks, and finally to determine the total collision risk and the related iso-risk surfaces for systems of (Formula presented.) parallel tracks with additions to account for the effects of more than two parallel tracks. The extended model is applied to a case study where airspace design for an urban area is conducted via maximization of the number of same-direction parallel tracks while meeting the target level of safety. The results suggest that lateral separation distances less than 100 m are achievable for small UAS, and that the separation standards are mostly affected by the proportion of poorly navigating aircraft.