Integrating Safety Metrics into the Arrival Capacity Management of large Aerodromes

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Hartmut Fricke
• Subject Area: Traffic and Transport Systems, Intelligent and Automated Traffic
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 445666898

By means of safety analysis methods for the socio-technical system "Air Traffic Control" in the vicinity of airports which were developed at the chair in various projects, today's capacity-relevant approach control of complex airports shall now be integrated into an overall optimization process with special focus on air traffic safety. Today's control procedures are based on an upstream safety assessment of route design, procedural rules and boundary conditions. In operational use, however, the system is bounced by significant fluctuations (weather, traffic composition), and only operational performance indicators are currently recorded and safety "in front of the parentheses" is certified as per se. This factual error is countered by conservative rules for separation values between approaching aircraft, but it does not lead the system to an overall optimal operating state. By integrating the safety assessment as an online procedure, it is intended to achieve a tactical level where safety analyses are constantly included in the performance assessment and thus leverage additional airspace and runway capacity.The correlation between quantitative safety indicators (collision/incidence probabilities) and the various ecological/economic performance characteristics (capacity, environment, cost efficiency) must be known, a previously unattained fact. A positive correlation between hazard potential and so-called "traffic complexity" is postulated as entropy, i.e. as a measure of disorder and thus of workload in the transport system, for which partially validated models are already available. Since it can be assumed that there is a contradiction between the two objective functions, the relationship between trade-offs in the ATM in this respect will be investigated further: Methodologically, multi-objective optimization methods are to be applied to an agent-based fast-time simulation available at the chair.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants