Causal Decision Support Tools for Strategic Trajectory De-confliction to Enable Seamless Aircraft Conflict Management (STREAM)

SESAR WP-E STREAM project seeks to fill a currently existing gap between the strategic and the tactical planning in ATM, by designing innovative tools capable of detecting and solving conflicts among aircraft in a time-efficient manner, in order to deliver traffic to ATCOs with a diminished number of conflicts. In this paper, Clustering and Interaction Causal Solver (ICS) models are presented, being developed under the formalism of Colored Petri Nets for the generation of several feasible conflict free solutions. By clustering, the computational complexity is significantly reduced. The separation of trajectories according to their interactions is the key idea in high-density traffic scenarios, bringing several benefits such as a direct increase of processing capacity and troubleshooting. In the same direction, the ICS model makes an intelligent construction through the use of causal interactions, thus limiting the search exploration process only to those combinations supported within each cluster. Therefore, both tools offer significant advantages over the efficiency and effectiveness for the construction and evaluation of Air Traffic Management conflict-free scenarios. According to the STREAM concept, these models produce multiple combinations of feasible conflict free solutions, to be later weighted according to different metrics (for efficiency, safety, robustness, equity and fairness among others) and selected based on stakeholders’ priorities. Considered as a whole, the decision support tool , once implemented, provides a new and efficient network-oriented conflict detection and resolution process, fitting into the overall performance framework currently implemented at European level. Keywords-Strategic ATM; Causal Modeling; Decision Support Tools; Colored Petri Nets.