CBL - Campus del Baix Llobregat

Projecte llegit

Títol: Air Traffic Control using separation algorithm based on Rules of the Air

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: BARRADO MUXÍ, CRISTINA

Departament: DAC

Títol: Air Traffic Control using separation algorithm based on Rules of the Air

Data inici oferta: 08-02-2022     Data finalització oferta: 08-10-2022


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    GR ENG SIST AEROESP
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Paraules clau:
collision avoidance, simulator, safety, rules of the air
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
Air traffic controllers (ATC) are today the mean to support separation between aircraft in managed airspace. As a human centered task it is limited in scalability. Capacity is the threshold of the number of aircraft that an ATC can safely manage.

Automation is seen as the future solution to increase capacity beyond the current limits. Machine learning algorithms are usied extensivelly to provide automation in many areas. Reinforcement learning is a machine learning technique in which the experiences are created by intertacting with a simulator.

In this project the student will develop an air traffic simulator to be used as the interactive environment for multiple agents being automated with reinforcement learning. The simulator will be based on Gym, a well known Python library. It will include uncertainties to make learning more realistic and similar to real-life situations.

The environment will run iterativelly for a number of steps, each having as input an action selected from a limited list of available actions (heading change, speed change, etc.) comming from each agent. The environment will hold a global state that will be changed with each action step. The new state is known as the observation function.

In addition the environment will measure the performance of the traffic under simulation. Performance indicators to show at the end of the simulation is the number of separation misses, the number of near miss collisions, the total distance of the flights, etc.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
Avoiding collisions is one of the main tasks of air traffic control. The rapid increase in air traffic and its continued growth raises the issue of assisting air traffic controllers in high complex traffic scenarios, where safety and efficiency cannot be compromised. Predictions estimated for the future of several decades¿ state that the current air traffic management system will not be able to withstand this increase in demand for air transport with the required levels of safety, efficiency and sustainability. Air traffic management is changing faster and faster towards more advanced and efficient technology, with the integration of automated support tools to assist air traffic controllers.
This document presents a method to enhance the performance and efficiency of the air traffic controllers¿ tasks: monitor and manage all aircraft flying through the airspace sector, performed in a centralised way. The objective is design a separation algorithm based on the general Rules of the Air. To achieve the goal of the project, Remain Well Clear and Closest Point of Approach concepts have been used as other sources of information. The policy algorithm is simulated in a controlled simulation environment. Regarding the results obtained at the end of this project, a reduction of the conflicts of a 99,41% is achieved compared with a situation without applying any instructions. The results of this project also include a sensitive analysis of the tuning of parameters. The performance of the policy model could be upgraded in the future applying Artificial Intelligence, so conflicts can be addressed in a much more efficient and accurate way.

© CBLTIC Campus del Baix Llobregat - UPC