Identifying Potential Conflicts and Corresponding Resolutions in the Upper Airspace from Historical Air Traffic Data

Kurzfassung

There is currently a shortage of air traffic controllers (ATCO), while air traffic volumes are projected to increase in the future. To ensure that ATCOs can manage this growing demand, it is necessary to develop supportive solutions. One widely explored approach is the development of decision-support tools that can assist ATCOs in their daily operations. For these systems to provide efficient support, their advisories need to be tailored to the ATCOs' preferences and the strategies they employ to accomplish their tasks. This poses the challenge of first analyzing what these strategies look like. A core responsibility of ATCOs is to ensure conflict-free trajectories and to intervene when potential conflicts between aircraft may arise. Designing a system that provides conflict resolution advisories that align with the strategies of ATCOs therefore requires an analysis of established processes. Since no dataset currently exists that would allow such an analysis, this work introduces an approach to generate one based on the Swedish Civil Air Traffic Control (SCAT) dataset. The proposed approach leverages the ADS-B data, flight plans, and issued clearances provided in the dataset to predict the trajectories of aircraft if they had not been issued clearance, whether this would have resulted in potential conflicts, and whether these interventions from ATCOs resolved these potential conflicts. Using this approach, overall 135 potential conflicts that were resolved by heading clearances and 3,720 that were resolved by flight level clearances could be found. The resulting data can be used in future research to study ATCO strategies and to design systems that provide conflict resolution advisories that are adapted to the way ATCOs work.