Remote Airport Traffic Control Center

Abstract

Research is described for realizing a Remote Airport Traffic Control Center (RAiCe) for remote surveillance and control of several small airports from a central location. Long term goal is the Virtual Tower for replacing the physical tower building by a sensor based control center without the need for an exposed location at the airport. Work and task analyses which were performed in a previous project [1][2] as well as results reported in the literature [3] indicate the importance of the visual information for present days controller's work procedures. This resulted in the concept of a high resolution video panorama system with zoom and augmented vision functions as controllers main HMI in the Remote Tower Center (RTC). A corresponding 180°-video panorama system was set up as experimental testbed at Braunschweig research airport which served for initial field testing. It consists of four digital high resolution CCD cameras located near Braunschweig tower, and a remotely controlled pan-tilt zoom (PTZ) camera (including automatic tracking option) with PC clusters for compression, image processing / movement detection, decompression and panorama reconstruction, and a 450 m fiberoptic Gbit Ethernet link between sensor and display clusters. Field testing of the reconstructed far view with participation of local controllers shows an effective visual resolution of 2 arcmin in agreement with the theoretical predictions. The digital video panorama provides the framework for video-see-through augmented vision for integration of additional information like weather and transponder data into the video. This allows for a potentially very compact RTO-work environment due to reduction numbers of displays. The PTZ camera provides a "foveal" vision component including object tracking options, with a high resolution exceeding the human eye within an observation angle less than 15°. The replay function allows for detailed reconstruction of specific events within full day video data (typically 500 GB) stored in the 4.5 Tbyte memory. Simulation systems are under development for support of the design of the RTCenter work environment, based on a two-airport 200°-tower-simulator with RTO-console extension and the Petri-net based computer simulation "FairControl" [4] using a simplified airport microworld. In addition to the small local Braunschweig research airport, within the ongoing project a second more distant international airport, controlled by DFS (the German ANSP) will be included into the experimental environment, in order to provide the framework for shadow mode testing. [1] N. Fürstenau, M. Schmidt, M. Rudolph, C. Möhlenbrink, W. Halle, "Augmented vision videopanorama system for remote airport tower operation", in: Proc. ICAS 2008, 26th Int. Congress of the Aeronautical Sciences. I. Grant (Ed.), Anchorage, (2008) ISBN 0-9533991-9-2 [2] M. Schmidt, M. Rudolph, B. Werther, N. Fürstenau, Development of an Augmented Vision Videopanorama Human-Machine Interface for Remote Airport Tower Operation, Proc. HCII2007 Beijing, Springer Lecture Notes Computer Science 4558 (2007) 1119-112 [3] Tavanti, M. (2006). "Control Tower Operations: A literature review of task analysis studies". Eurocontrol Experimental Center, EEC Report, 2006/06 [4] Werther, B., Möhlenbrink, C., Rudolph, M., "Colored petri net based formal airport control model for simulation and analysis of airport control processes", In: V.G. Duffy (Ed.) Digital Human Modeling, Lect. Notes Computer Science vol.4561, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg (2007), p. 1027-1036