Surface conformance monitoring in the NextGen timeframe

The Federal Aviation Administration's Surface Trajectory-based Operations (STBO) concept is part of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) vision for the mid- and far-term. The STBO concept describes a suite of decision support tools (DSTs) for use in the air traffic control tower to support safe and efficient surface operations. Research on the STBO DST capabilities is currently being conducted by The MITRE Corporation's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD). Human-in-the-loop simulations focusing on the STBO DSTs have taken place at CAASD's Aviation Integration Demonstration and Experimentation for Aeronautics (IDEA) Lab in McLean, Virginia under the sponsorship of the FAA's Aviation Research and Technology Development Office and in collaboration with Mosaic ATM, Inc. This paper describes the proposed set of automation capabilities to support ground controller (GC) and local controller (LC) activities in the NextGen mid-term (~2018), including automated DSTs to generate taxi routes and monitor pilot conformance to the assigned taxi route. Automation to support surface conformance monitoring supports goals of 1) a safer airport surface through detecting surface movement non-conformance that contributes to runway incursions and 2) increased efficiency of operations by ensuring taxiing aircraft are in compliance with assigned taxi routes. In the surface conformance monitoring concept, tower controllers will be provided with automation assistance to monitor whether an aircraft is in compliance with its assigned taxi route and to selected control instructions, such as, for example, line up and wait or takeoff clearances. The aircraft's assigned taxi route from its present position to its surface destination is stored in the automation. The surface conformance monitoring automation will compare the current position of the aircraft with the assigned taxi route and detect, or in the far-term, predict, non-conformance. This paper describes automation for surface conformance monitoring and scenarios to illustrate future operations.