Publications

The Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) is mandated on all large transport aircraft to reduce mid-air collision risk. Since its introduction, no mid-air collisions between TCAS-equipped aircraft have occurred in the United States. However, General Aviation (GA) aircraft are generally not equipped with TCAS and experience collisions several times per year. There is interest in low-cost collision avoidance systems for GA aircraft to reduce collision risk with other GA aircraft as well as with TCAS-equipped aircraft. Since TCAS was designed for large aircraft that can achieve greater vertical rates, the assumptions made by the system and the associated advisories are not always appropriate for GA aircraft. Modifying the TCAS logic to accommodate GA aircraft is far from straightforward. Even minor changes to TCAS to correct operational issues are difficult to implement due to the interaction of the complex rules defining the logic. Recent work has explored an alternative to the TCAS logic based on optimization with respect to a probabilistic model of aircraft behavior. The model encodes performance constraints of GA aircraft, and a computational technique called dynamic programming allows the optimal collision avoidance strategy to be computed efficiently. Prior work has focused on systems that meet the performance assumptions of the existing TCAS logic. However, these assumptions are not always appropriate for GA aircraft. This paper will present simulation results comparing the existing logic to logic that has been optimized to operate onboard GA aircraft. If both aircraft are equipped with collision avoidance logic, it is important that the advisories be coordinated to prevent both aircraft from climbing or descending. The TCAS logic has a built-in coordination mechanism with which a GA system must maintain compatibility. Several coordination strategies, both with the optimized logic and the current logic, are evaluated in simulation.

The recent development of high-fidelity U.S. airspace encounter models at Lincoln Laboratory has motivated a simulation study of the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) multiple threat logic. We observed from archived radar data that while rarer than single-threat encounters, multiple threat encounters occur more frequently than originally expected. The multithreat logic has not been analyzed in the past using encounter models. To generate multi-threat encounters, this report extends the statistical techniques used to develop pairwise correlated encounters. We generated and simulated a large number of multi-threat encounters using the TCAS logic implemented in Lincoln Laboratory's Collision Avoidance System Safety Assessment Tool. Near mid-air collision (NMAC) count indicates how often close encounters are resolved, unresolved, or induced by TCAS. Change in vertical miss distance shows the effect of the additional threat on the vertical separation between the first two aircraft. Risk ratio measures how the probability of an NMAC changes when an aircraft is equipped with TCAS versus being unequipped. Study results indicate that in multi-threat encounters, the TCAS logic results in a more than twofold increase in unresolved NMACs and approximately five times more induced NMACs than one-on-one encounters. TCAS provides a safety benefit in multi-threat encounters by issuing resolution advisories that result in increased vertical separation between the equipped aircraft and the first intruder.