The Design and Implementation of the Collision Avoidance Warning Function in the Air Traffic Control System

An aircraft collision accident is a disaster that causes great losses of inventories and lives. Though a collision avoidance warning function is provided automatically to pilots in the aircrafts by the enhancement of the aircraft capability, achieving fast decision-making to escape a collision situation is a complex and dangerous work for pilots. If an in-flight collision situation is controlled by the air traffic control system which monitors all airplanes in the air, it would be more efficient to prevent in-flight collisions because it can handle the emergency before the pilot's action. In this paper, we develop the collision avoidance warning function in the air traffic control system. Specifically, we design and implement the five stages of the collision avoidance function, and propose a visualization method which could effectively provide the operators with the trajectories and altitudes of the aircrafts in a collision situation. By developing an in-flight collision warning function in the air traffic control system that visualizes flight patterns through the state transition data of in-flight aircrafts on the flight path lines, it can effectively prevent in-flight collisions with traffic alerts. The developed function allows operators to effectively select and control the aircraft in a collision situation by providing the operators with the expected collision time, the relative distance, and the relative altitude while assessing the level of alert, and visualizing the alert information which includes the Attention-Warning-Alert phase via embodying the TCAS standard. With the developed function the air traffic control system could sense an in-flight collision situation before the pilot's decision-making moment.

항공관제 시스템에서 항공기 공중충돌 경고기능의 설계 및 구현