Title: Cost-Benefit Study of Free Flight with Airborne Separation Assurance
Abstract: The research presented in this paper is based on the Free Flight with Airborne Separation Assurance concept that has been developed for the 1997 NASA Free Flight project, conducted at the National Aerospace Laboratory in Amsterdam. As a follow-up to the 1997 project, this paper first focuses on the issues of fuel and time efficiency of conflict resolution manoeuvres in Free Flight using the Airborne Separation Assurance concept as a baseline. First, the fuel and time efficiency of possible conflict resolution manoeuvres (heading change and altitude change) were analysed on a small scale by conducting so-called one-on-one simulation experiments, and a decision model was constructed based on these results. Next, a cost-benefit analysis of Free Flight was performed on a large scale by simulating a mixed-equipped traffic environment over a specified area in European Airspace. These large-scale Monte-Carlo simulation experiments were conducted with various mixes of Free Flight traffic (equipped for airborne separation assurance) flying direct routes, and baseline (non-equipped) traffic following the current Air Traffic Control (ATC) system’s route structure. It was found that Free Flight traffic flying along direct routes consumed less fuel than the baseline traffic flying along ATC routes, even though the Free Flight traffic manoeuvred for separation assurance while the ATC routing traffic did not deviate from their flight paths.
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 8
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