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Surveillance Accuracy Requirements in Support of Separation Services Surveillance Accuracy Requirements in Support of Separation Services Steven D • THOMPSON AND FLAVIN Surveillance Accuracy Requirements in Support of Separation Services Surveillance Accuracy Requirements in Support of Separation Services Steven D. Thompson and James M. Flavin n The Federal Aviation Administration is modernizing the Air Traffic Control system to improve flight efficiency, to increase airspace capacity, to reduce flight delays, and to control operating costs as the demand for air travel continues to grow. Promising new surveillance technologies such as Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast and multisensor track fusion offer the potential to augment the ground-based surveillance and controller-display systems by providing more timely and complete information about aircraft. The resulting improvement in surveillance accuracy may potentially allow the expanded use of the minimum safe-separation distance between aircraft. However, these new technologies cannot be introduced with today’s radar-separation standards, because they assume surveillance will be provided only through radar technology. In this article, we review the background of aircraft surveillance and the establishment of radar separation standards. The required surveillance accuracy to safely support aircraft separation with National Airspace System technologies is then derived from currently widely used surveillance systems. We end with flight test validation of the derived results, which can be used to evaluate new technologies. urveillance of aircraft in today’s National between nearby aircraft. Because of the fixed radiation Airspace System (NAS) has been provided for pattern, the accuracy of these radar systems in measur- Sdecades by a system of terminal and en route ing separation within a particular operating environ- track-while-scan radars. The separation distance that ment changes only with the range of the aircraft from an air traffic controller is required to maintain be- the sensor and whether both aircraft are being moni- tween aircraft depends in part on the performance of tored by the same radar. For this reason, the present- these radars, which provide surveillance by process- day separation standards are expressed in limited radar ing both the reflected energy from high-energy pulses terminology—single sensor, mosaic of sensors, and range transmitted toward the aircraft skin (primary radar) from a sensor. and the replies to the interrogation messages trans- Historically, new surveillance systems have been mitted to aircraft transponders (secondary radar). improvements to track-while-scan radar design. This Ground-based antennas radiate fan-beam patterns at is not the case for several new surveillance technolo- fixed rotation rates and transmit pulse sequences. The gies. Consequently, we need a fundamental change in aircraft transponder responses and reflected energy the method of approving these new systems, which are processed to present to controllers an image that include Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broad- depicts the identity, location, altitude, and separation cast (ADS-B), multifunctional phased-array radar VOLUME 16, NUMBER 1, 2006 LINCOLN LABORATORY JOURNAL 97 • THOMPSON AND FLAVIN Surveillance Accuracy Requirements in Support of Separation Services (MPAR), and multi-sensor track fusion. Under ADS- erence to the particular technologies used to achieve B, aircraft automatically broadcast a state vector, at the requirements. This article is concerned with the fixed one-second intervals, that includes the aircraft required surveillance accuracy, a subset of RSP. Other position, velocity, identity, intent, and emergency sta- RSP attributes include integrity, availability, continu- tus. A key advantage of this approach is that surveil- ity of service, and probability of detection. lance can be achieved through low-cost, listen-only ground stations; and position accuracy becomes de- Early Sensor and Separation Standards pendent upon the source avionics that typically in- Before the introduction of radar, procedural separa- clude a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. The tion was used by air traffic controllers to maintain surveillance accuracy does not depend on the range of safe distances between aircraft whenever pilots could the aircraft from the ground stations or the number of not maintain visual separation. In procedural separa- stations used. tion, blocks of airspace are reserved for one airplane The MPAR concept combines the function of to- at a time. Position reports are provided by pilots to day’s long-range and short-range aircraft surveillance the controllers, who then provide separation by clear- and weather radar into a single system [1]. With this ing only one aircraft at a time into a block of airspace. concept, electronically scanned antenna modules are Procedural separation is still used in the NAS today in implemented in an overlapping subarray architec- areas without radar coverage. ture to illuminate aircraft with a single electronically A history of the origins of the initial radar separa- steered transmit beam, with returns received through tion standards for civil air traffic control is given by a cluster of narrow beams to maintain azimuth and el- the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) agency evation accuracy. However, this system would not em- historian E. Preston [4]. Preston notes that the estab- ploy fixed-rotation rates and pulse sequencing similar lishment of the separation standards “was the result of to today’s track-while-scan systems. Consequently, sur- an evolutionary process that included close coordina- veillance accuracy would depend on range, waveform tion with airspace users…” and that the standard “rep- design, beam steering schedule, and other factors that resented a consensus of the aviation community.” It is cannot be conveyed by today’s separation standards. clear that no specific analytical approach was used to Multi-sensor track fusion systems process reports derive the separation standards and there are, accord- from multiple sources to form a single track. Surveil- ing to Preston, different accounts of how the specific lance accuracy depends upon the available sensors, fu- standards were chosen. The separation standard for sion algorithms, and coverage reliability. Again, separa- terminal procedures was set at three miles and for en tion accuracy could not be conveyed in terms of range route at five miles. Preston concluded that the basis from a single radar. for setting the standards “seems to have included such Surveillance requirements depend on the types of factors as: military precedent; reasoned calculations; a separation service being supported, i.e., three-mile desire to choose a figure acceptable to pilots; and the separation or five-mile separation.* Consequently, limitations of both the radar equipment and of the international standardization is increasingly based on human elements of the system. The use of five miles Required Total System Performance (RTSP) specifica- as the separation for flights over forty miles from the tions that are independent of the particular technolo- radar site was based on the greater limitations of the gies of implementation. The term Required Surveil- long-range equipment.” lance Performance (RSP) is the subset of RTSP that With the introduction of radar, separation stan- is concerned with surveillance requirements [2, 3]. In dards were established on the basis of the performance theory, when a type of air traffic service is specified, of those early radar sensors. The first air traffic con- it should be possible to derive the RSP without ref- trol radars used the primary broadband video return displayed on a cathode-ray screen, or scope, to sepa- * All distances described in this article are nautical miles. All aircraft rate aircraft. Because errors in azimuth measurement speeds are given in knots. resulted in increased position errors as the range of the 98 LINCOLN LABORATORY JOURNAL VOLUME 16, NUMBER 1, 2006 • THOMPSON AND FLAVIN Surveillance Accuracy Requirements in Support of Separation Services aircraft increased from the radar, separation standards monopulse beacon systems, even though both beacon were introduced that are functions of how far the air- and primary measurements are taken. However, when craft are from the radar. There was no specific analysis the primary radar is collocated with a sliding-window done to justify the original separation requirements; secondary surveillance system, the position informa- however, in operational use, the standards proved safe tion for a reinforced report is the position estimate and effective in the airspace of that day. As radar equip- made by the primary radar. ment accuracy and range improved, it was necessary to refine the standards; nevertheless, they have remained Error Analysis relatively constant over the last several decades. S.D. Thompson and S.R. Bussolari reviewed the error The introduction of secondary (beacon) radar of- characteristics of long-range and short-range sliding- fered a significant improvement in the performance of window ATCRBS and MSSR surveillance sensors [5]. radar sensors by utilizing the reply from an aircraft’s Errors in the measured separation distance between transponder to measure position. The use of a tran- targets were analyzed for both single-sensor cases in sponder provides a higher power return and allows the which the aircraft being separated were tracked by dif- aircraft to supply the system with data such as aircraft ferent radars. Monte Carlo simulations were run to identification and altitude. Today’s
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