Model predictive control approach to global air collision avoidance

Purpose – Most of the existing approaches for flight collision avoidance are concerned with local traffic alone for which the separation is based on the pairwise analysis of aircraft trajectory trends, which is not efficient with regard to some flight path requirements along waypoints. The purpose of this paper is to deal with the global collision avoidance problem which aims at separating aircraft taking into consideration the global traffic in a given area instead of considering them pairwise. It aims to model the concept of global collision avoidance and propose a validated algorithm for the purpose in the framework of free-flight. Design/methodology/approach – The collision avoidance procedure computes online the appropriate speed and heading for each aircraft, at each sampling time-instant, to generate a collision-free flight trajectory along scheduled waypoints. The method accounts for automatic assignment of priority indexes that are updated from one control time horizon to the next. The paper considers here the case of aircraft flying at the same altitude, but the proposed method is easily extendable to the general 3D situation. Owing to the predictive features that are inherent to collision avoidance, the collision-free trajectories are generated using model predictive control approach. A simulation example is presented in the end and its results show the suitability of the proposed approach. Findings – Since the model predictive control approach is used, the collision avoidance procedure is anticipative; therefore, the avoidance capability depends only on the prediction horizon rather than on the control horizon. Practical implications – The computation of the trajectory guidance information (speed and heading) at each time-step is fast, therefore the proposed method is well suited for online processing requirements in real world applications. Originality/value – The paper provides a flexible modelling framework and a computationally effective algorithm, both based on model predictive control concepts, to cope with global collision avoidance for flight safety enhancement in the framework of free-flight.