Title page for ETD etd-11092007-105224 ( Browse

Type of Document

Master's Thesis

Author

Treleaven, Kyle B

Author's Email Address

kbt2@pitt.edu

URN

etd-11092007-105224

Title

CONFLICT RESOLUTION AND TRAFFIC COMPLEXITY OF MULTIPLE INTERSECTING FLOWS OF AIRCRAFT

Degree

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering

Program

Electrical Engineering

School

School of Engineering

Advisory Committee

Advisor Name	Title
Zhi-Hong Mao	Committee Chair
J. Robert Boston	Committee Member
Patrick Loughlin	Committee Member

Keywords

flows of aircraft
complexity
airspace capacity

Date of Defense

2007-11-28

Availability

unrestricted

Abstract

This paper proposes a general framework to study conflict resolution for multiple intersecting flows of aircraft in a planar airspace.
The conflict resolution problem is decomposed into a sequence of sub-problems each involving only two intersecting flows of aircraft.
The strategy for achieving the decomposition is to displace the aircraft flows so that they intersect in pairs, instead of all at once, and so that the resulting conflict zones have no overlap.
A conflict zone is defined as a circular area centered at the intersection of a pair of flows which allows aircraft approaching the intersection to resolve conflict completely within the conflict zone, without straying outside.
An optimization problem is then formulated to displace the aircraft flows in a way that keeps airspace demand as low as possible.
Although this optimization problem is difficult to solve in general due to its non-convex nature, a closed-form solution can be obtained for three intersecting flows.
The metric used for the airspace demand is the radius of the smallest circular region (control space) encompassing all of the non-overlapping conflict zones.
This radius can also be used as an indication of traffic complexity for multiple intersecting flows of aircraft.
It is shown that the growth of the demand for control-space radius is of the fourth order against the number of intersecting flows of aircraft in a symmetric configuration.

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