Spatially-Temporal Interdependencies for the Aerial Ecosystem Identification

Present research in Air Traffic Management (ATM) is going towards improvement of airspace capacity, accessibility and efficiency while reducing the management costs and increasing the safety performance indicators. A 4D contract between an Airspace User (AU) and Air Traffic Control, in which aircraft should be located at a given time on a particular waypoint, opens a wide scope of applications for decision support tools (DSTs). This paper introduces a new modeling approach for a smooth safety nets transition within the high en-route airspace operations. The approach is based on a causal state space search as a response to some shortages in the collision avoidance events, resulted from a limited logic of Traffic alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). It considers Enhanced TCAS (E-TCAS) that relies on an extended time horizon at the separation management level to define functionalities that will provide the most optimal resolution trajectories and remove the deadlock scenarios. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.