Improved Air Traffic Control with Cooperative Surveillance Techniques
Stephan Schulz (Comsoft GmbH)
NICTA LC SEMINARDATE: 2008-08-06
TIME: 16:00:00 - 17:00:00
LOCATION: NICTA - 7 London Circuit
CONTACT: JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.
ABSTRACT:
Aircraft in controlled airspace are flying under the direction of air traffic controllers, which are responsible for safe, orderly, and expeditious traffic flow. In particular, maintaining proper aircraft separation is not left to individual pilots, but subject to air traffic control.
To support controllers in their task, surveillance systems are used to provide an air situation picture. The quality of the air situation picture determines both the workload of the controller and the safe separation limits of aircraft, and hence significantly influences the safe capacity of the air space. Most of todays surveillance systems are based on rotating antenna radars. However, radars are expensive to build and operate. They have a relatively low update rate and limited scalability.
New surveillance techniques rely on cooperative aircraft to overcome this disadvantage. Multilateration systems use a scalable array of small, low-cost sensors to determine aircraft position and parameters from the time difference of arrival of aircraft transponder signals. They achieve high accuracy, can provide updates several times per second, and provide secondary information about the aircraft based on the content of the received messages.
An even more radical departure from classical radar is Automated
Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast. With ADS-B, the aircraft
determines its own position using a global navigation satellite
system. It broadcasts this position and auxiliary information,
typically several times per second. The signal can be received by a
low-cost ADS-B ground station with a simple omni-directional
antenna. Thus, a small, passive sensor can provide a high-quality air
situation picture.
BIO:
Stephan Schulz studied computer science and physics at the University
of Kaiserslautern and graduated (Dipl. Inform.) in 1995. In the same
year he joined the Automated Reasoning Group at the Technical
University Munich. In 2000 he obtained a Ph.D. in computer science for
his work on learning search control strategies for first-order
deduction. He has contributed to the development of several
high-performance deduction systems. Dr. Schulz is best known for
developing E, one of the most friendly theorem provers for first-order
equational logic. He taught at TU Munich, the University of Miami, and
the University of the West Indies.
In 2005 he joined Comsoft GmbH, a German provider of solutions in he
field of air traffic control, where he now is responsible for research
and development of future surveillance technologies.
