Computationally efficient conflict detection methods for air traffic management

Air traffic management (ATM) combines the roles of air traffic control (ATC) and traffic flow management (TFM). Generally, TFM is concerned with the smooth and efficient flow of traffic in the airspace while ATC has the responsibility for maintaining the separation between aircraft. The challenge for the ATM system is to accommodate growth in air traffic while maintaining the same level of safety and increased operator flexibility. This can only be achieved by introducing the technological innovations in communication, navigation and surveillance (CNS) and by the development of decision support tools for controllers, pilots and airline operations. Basic components of these decision support tools are algorithms and software for conflict detection and resolution. This paper takes a detailed look at the standard approach to conflict detection in order to reduce the number of computations. The number of computations are reduced by posing the conflict detection problem in two steps: (a) spatial separation and (b) temporal separation. Three algorithms for conflict detection are described.