Publications
A preliminary investigation of Tower Flight Data Manager safety benefits
July 21, 2012
Conference Paper
Published in:
Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics Conf., 21 July 2012.
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Summary
Improvements to current air traffic management technologies and techniques are required to move toward the next generation air transportation system (NextGen). The Tower Flight Data Manager (TFDM) is a prototype air traffic control system consisting of the: (1) Flight Data Manager (FDM) facilitating interaction with electronic flight data, (2) Tower Information Display System (TIDS) providing enhanced surveillance information, and (3) Supervisor Display providing a means for front line managers and traffic management coordinators to interact with strategic and tactical planning and decision support tools. Given that TFDM aims to enable safe and efficient operations under NextGen, it is critical to analyze potential safety impacts and determine what types of real-world safety issues can be prevented or mitigated by TFDM. With this goal in mind, we reviewed 560 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) reports focusing on commercial air carrier operations over a five year period. Over 100 reports were deemed relevant to TFDM and further analyzed to determine the likelihood that these safety-related events could have been mitigated or prevented by the key TFDM capabilities outlined above. A systematic method for generating probabilistic estimates of benefits for a technology not yet deployed was utilized to produce effectiveness ratings for the various TFDM components.
Summary
Improvements to current air traffic management technologies and techniques are required to move toward the next generation air transportation system (NextGen). The Tower Flight Data Manager (TFDM) is a prototype air traffic control system consisting of the: (1) Flight Data Manager (FDM) facilitating interaction with electronic flight data, (2) Tower...
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Data-driven evaluation of a flight re-route air traffic management decision-support tool
July 21, 2012
Conference Paper
Published in:
Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics Conf., 21 July 2012.
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Air traffic delays in the U.S. are problematic and often attributable to convective (thunderstorms) weather. Air traffic management is complex, dynamic, and influenced by many factors such as projected high volume of departures and uncertain forecast convective weather at airports and in the airspace. To support the complexities of making a re-route decision, which is one solution to mitigate airspace congestion, a display integrating convective weather information with departure demand predictions was prototyped jointly by MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the MITRE Corporation. The tool was deployed to twelve air traffic facilities involved in handling New York area flights for operational evaluation during the summer of 2011. Field observations, data mining and analyses were conducted under both fair and convective weather conditions. The system performance metrics chosen to evaluate the tool's effectiveness in supporting re-route decisions include predicted wheels-off error, predicted wheels-off forecast spread, and hourly departure fix demand forecast spread. The wheels-off prediction errors were near zero for half the flights across all days, but the highest 10% errors exceeded 30 minutes on convective weather days. The wheels-off forecast spread exceeded 30 minutes for 25% of forecasts on convective weather days. The hourly departure demand forecast spread was 9 flights or less for 50% of departures across all days except one. Six out of the seven days having the highest hourly departure demand forecast spreads occurred in the presence of long-lived weather impacts.
Summary
Air traffic delays in the U.S. are problematic and often attributable to convective (thunderstorms) weather. Air traffic management is complex, dynamic, and influenced by many factors such as projected high volume of departures and uncertain forecast convective weather at airports and in the airspace. To support the complexities of making...
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Establishing wind information needs for four dimensional trajectory-based operations
June 26, 2012
Conference Paper
Published in:
1st Int. Conf. on Interdisciplinary Science for Innovative Air Traffic Management, ISIATM, 26 June 2012.
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Accurate wind information is of fundamental importance to the delivery of benefits from future air traffic concepts. A Wind Information Analysis Framework is described in this paper and its utility for assessing wind information needs for a four-dimensional trajectory based operations application is demonstrated.
Summary
Accurate wind information is of fundamental importance to the delivery of benefits from future air traffic concepts. A Wind Information Analysis Framework is described in this paper and its utility for assessing wind information needs for a four-dimensional trajectory based operations application is demonstrated.
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Towards the detection of aircraft icing conditions using operational dual-polarimetric radar
June 25, 2012
Conference Paper
Published in:
7th European Conf. on Radar in Meteorology and Hydrology, ERAD, 25-29 June 2012.
Summary
In anticipation of the dual-polarimetric upgrade to the National Weather Service operational radar network (WSR-88D) research is being conducted to utilize this extensive new data source for remote aircraft icing detection. The first challenge is to accurately locate the melting layer. A new image-processing-based algorithm is proposed and demonstrated. The next challenge is to use the dual-polarimetric data above the melting level to distinguish regions containing super-cooled liquid water, which constitutes an aviation icing hazard, from regions of pure ice and snow. It has been well documented that the S-band dual-polarimetric radar signatures at individual range gates of super-cooled liquid water and ice crystals overlap significantly, complicating the identification of icing conditions using individual radar measurements. Recently several investigators have found that the aggregate characteristics of dual-polarimetric radar measurements over regions on the order of several kilometers show distinguishing features between regions containing super-cooled liquid and those with ice only. In this study, the features found in the literature are evaluated, extended and combined using a fuzzy-logic framework to provide an icing threat likelihood. The results of this new algorithm are computed using data collected in Colorado from the Colorado State University CHILL radar and the National Center for Atmospheric Research S-Pol radar (collectively called FRONT – The Front Range Observational Testbed) collected in the winter of 2010/2011 in coordination with the NASA Icing Remote Sensing System (NIRSS) and compared to pilot reports on approach or departure from nearby airports. The preliminary results look encouraging and will be presented. The ultimate goal is to produce an end-to-end algorithm to produce a reliable icing threat product that can then be combined with existing icing detection systems to improve their performance.
Summary
In anticipation of the dual-polarimetric upgrade to the National Weather Service operational radar network (WSR-88D) research is being conducted to utilize this extensive new data source for remote aircraft icing detection. The first challenge is to accurately locate the melting layer. A new image-processing-based algorithm is proposed and demonstrated. The...
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A safety driven approach to the development of an airborne sense and avoid system
June 19, 2012
Conference Paper
Published in:
AIAA Infotech at Aerospace Conf. and Exhibit, 19-21 June 2012.
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Sense and avoid is the primary technical barrier to increased unmanned aircraft system airspace access. A safety assessment driven approach to sense and avoid system design and requirements validation is being employed to ensure safety and operational suitability. The foundation of this approach is a fast-time modeling and simulation architecture originally used to support the certification of the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System. This paper describes the safety assessment methodology, including the architecture and evaluation metrics, and presents preliminary results for key system architecture and design tradeoffs.
Summary
Sense and avoid is the primary technical barrier to increased unmanned aircraft system airspace access. A safety assessment driven approach to sense and avoid system design and requirements validation is being employed to ensure safety and operational suitability. The foundation of this approach is a fast-time modeling and simulation architecture...
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NextGen surveillance and weather radar capability (NSWRC) siting analysis
May 22, 2012
Project Report
Published in:
Project Report ATC-391, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Summary
As the current radars that perform weather and aircraft surveillance over the United States age, they must be sustained through service life extension programs or replaced. In the latter case, the radars can be replaced by multiple types of radars with different missions or they can be replaced by scalable multifunction phased array radars (MPARs). State-of-the-art active phased array systems have the potential to provide improved capabilities such as earlier detection and better characterization of hazardous weather phenomena, 3D tracking of noncooperative aircraft, better avoidance of unwanted clutter sources such as wind farms, and more graceful performance degradation with component failure. As the U.S. aviation community works toward realizing the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), achieving improved capabilities for aircraft and weather surveillance becomes critical, because stricter observation requirements are believed to be needed. Hence, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is considering the MPAR as a possible solution to their NextGen Surveillance and Weather Radar Capability (NSWRC). Cost is one hurdle to the deployment of a modern phased array radar network. One way of lowering the overall cost is to reduce the total number of radars. Because of the overlap in coverage provided by the current radar networks, a unified MPAR replacement network can potentially decrease the total number of radars needed to cover the same airspace. An earlier analysis conducted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory concluded that 510 legacy radars could be effectively replaced by 334 MPARs over the contiguous United States (CONUS). There was, however, some uncertainty whether the spatial resolution used in the terrain blockage calculations was fine enough to accurately depict radar coverage, and also if terminal area coverage was being adequately addressed. This study revisits the siting analysis using a much finer spatial resolution, expands the coverage domain to include all fifty states and U.S. territories, adds the Air Force long-range surveillance radars (FPSs) to the legacy pool, and allows scaling by number of faces per radar. The aim is to provide an estimate of the minimum number of MPARs needed to replace the existing radar coverage. We also provide an extensive statistical compilation of legacy versus MPAR coverage for various observational performance parameters.
Summary
As the current radars that perform weather and aircraft surveillance over the United States age, they must be sustained through service life extension programs or replaced. In the latter case, the radars can be replaced by multiple types of radars with different missions or they can be replaced by scalable...
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Dallas/Fort Worth field demonstration #2 (DFW-2) final report for Tower Flight Data Manager (TFDM)
May 16, 2012
Project Report
Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report ATC-393
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The Tower Flight Data Manager (TFDM) is the next generation air traffic control tower (ATCT) information system that integrates surveillance, flight data, and other sources, which enables advanced decision support tools (DSTs) to improve departure and arrival efficiency and reduce fuel burn at the airport. TFDM was exercised as a prototype installed at the Dallas / Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) during a two-week demonstration in the spring of 2011 termed DFW-2. MIT Lincoln Laboratory conducted this demonstration for the FAA in coordination with DFW air traffic control (ATC) and the DFW airport authority. The objective of this TFDM field demonstration was to validate the operational suitability and refine production system requirements of the Tower Information Display System (TIDS) surface surveillance display and Flight Data Manager (FDM) electronic flight data display and to evaluate the first iteration of the Supervisor Display and DSTs. These objectives were met during the two-week field demonstration. Results indicated that the TIDS and FDM exhibited capabilities considered operationally suitable for the tower as an advisory system and as a primary means for control given surface surveillance that is approved for operational use. Human factors data indicated that TIDS and FDM could be beneficial. The prototype Supervisor Display and DSTs met a majority of the technical performance criteria, but fewer than half of the human factors success criteria were met. As this was the first iteration of the Supervisor Display and DST capabilities, subsequent prototype iterations to achieve the target concept of operations, functionality and information presentation with accompanying field demonstrations to evaluate these honed capabilities were recommended and expected. FLM/TMC feedback will help refine subsequent system design.
Summary
The Tower Flight Data Manager (TFDM) is the next generation air traffic control tower (ATCT) information system that integrates surveillance, flight data, and other sources, which enables advanced decision support tools (DSTs) to improve departure and arrival efficiency and reduce fuel burn at the airport. TFDM was exercised as a...
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Evaluation of the Integrated Departure Route Planning (IDRP) Tool 2011 prototype
May 3, 2012
Project Report
Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report ATC-388
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The Integrated Departure Route Planning (IDRP) tool combines convective weather impact forecasts from the Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) with departure demand forecasts from the MITRE tfmCore system to aid traffic managers in formulating plans to mitigate volume congestion in fair weather and during convective weather impacts. An initial prototype was deployed in the summer of 2010 for a very limited field evaluation. A second, more comprehensive field evaluation of the "Phase 2" IDRP prototype was performed in the summer of 2011. The key focus of IDRP is the planning and implementation of departure reroutes to avoid weather impacts and volume congestion on departure fixes and routes. This evaluation assesses three facets of the IDRP prototype critical to the successful realization of its concept of operations: 1. performance of weather impact forecasts from RAPT and departure demand forecasts from tfmCore, 2. effectiveness of reroute decisions, and 3. potential impacts on procedures and decision making based on observations of IDRP use in the field. The evaluation concludes with suggestions for future enhancements to improve the performance and realization of potential benefits in operational use of IDRP.
Summary
The Integrated Departure Route Planning (IDRP) tool combines convective weather impact forecasts from the Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) with departure demand forecasts from the MITRE tfmCore system to aid traffic managers in formulating plans to mitigate volume congestion in fair weather and during convective weather impacts. An initial prototype...
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Next-generation airborne collision avoidance system
April 11, 2012
Journal Article
Published in:
Lincoln Laboratory Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012, pp. 17-33.
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In response to a series of midair collisions involving commercial airliners, Lincoln Laboratory was directed by the Federal Aviation Administration in the 1970s to participate in the development of an onboard collision avoidance system. In its current manifestation, the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System is mandated worldwide on all large aircraft and has significantly improved the safety of air travel, but major changes to the airspace planned over the coming years will require substantial modification to the system. Recently, Lincoln Laboratory has been pioneering the development of a new approach to collision avoidance systems that completely rethinks how such systems are engineered, allowing the system to provide a higher degree of safety without interfering with normal, safe operations.
Summary
In response to a series of midair collisions involving commercial airliners, Lincoln Laboratory was directed by the Federal Aviation Administration in the 1970s to participate in the development of an onboard collision avoidance system. In its current manifestation, the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System is mandated worldwide on all...
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Hazard alerting based on probabilistic models
March 1, 2012
Journal Article
Published in:
J. Guidance, Control, Dynamics, Vol. 35, No. 2, March-April 2012, pp. 442-450.
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Hazard alerting systems alert operators to potential future undesirable events so that action may be taken to mitigate risk. One way to develop a hazard alerting system based on probabilistic models is by using a threshold-based approach, where the probability of the undesirable event without mitigation is compared against a threshold. Another way to develop such a system is to model the system as a Markov decision process and solve for the hazard experiments reveal that an expected utility approach performs better than threshold-based approaches when the dynamic stochasticity is high, where accounting for delays or changes in the alert becomes more important. however, for certain system parameters and operating environments, a threshold-based approach may provide comparable performance.
Summary
Hazard alerting systems alert operators to potential future undesirable events so that action may be taken to mitigate risk. One way to develop a hazard alerting system based on probabilistic models is by using a threshold-based approach, where the probability of the undesirable event without mitigation is compared against a...
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