Terminal-Area Aircraft Tracking Using Hybrid Estimation

A bottleneck to the flow of air traffic is in the traffic around airports. Accurate tracking of aircraft movements around airports is important to improve traffic capacity and safety. We propose a hybrid estimation algorithm that uses the knowledge of departure or arrival aircraft flight plans and nominal flight profiles to improve tracking of aircraft movements around airports. The algorithm also provides an accurate estimation of aircraft flight modes that is often used in conflict detection, intent inference, and trajectory prediction algorithms. In the algorithm, we first develop a methodology to model flight mode transitions based on typical aircraft landing profiles, takeoff profiles, and standard flight routes around airports. Based on the model, we derive a conditional mode transition matrix that is dependent (or conditioned) on the continuous state of the aircraft. The aircraft-tracking problem is then solved using a hybrid estimation algorithm. We also present an analytical result that reduces the dimension, and hence the computational cost, of a multivariate integral that arises due to the continuous-state-dependent mode transition matrix. We present two simulation examples to illustrate the performance of our aircraft-tracking algorithm.