Strategic Conflict Probabilities in the European Air Traffic Management Network

Abstract

The complexity of European Air Traffic is accompanied by a continuous risk of conflicts between aircraft. In particular, inaccurate forecasts of aircraft positions prevent a fail-proof prediction of conflicts, especially for large look-ahead times. Uncertainty of departure times is one of the most important factors in trajectory prediction. Therefore, we compute strategic conflict probabilities between planned trajectories with stochastic departure times. First, potentially conflicted flight pairs are geometrically identified and further interpreted to gain critical periods of time in which conflicts would materialize with a given probability. Conflict probabilities of planned trajectories of a complete daily traffic sample are calculated. Results dissect the dependency of conflict probabilities on departure time deviations and on conflict geometry. Finally, an upper bound of strategic conflict reduction by strategic time shifts is computed.