Assessing the impact of communication delays on advanced air mobility cooperative surveillance

Abstract

Advanced air mobility, the next evolution in air transportation, emphasizes the crucial need for a high level of automation to enable the coexistence of manned and unmanned aircraft and transform airspace from segregated to unsegregated, empowering aircraft to manage self-separation and collision avoidance autonomously. This paper introduces a separation assurance and collision avoidance that adopts a unified analytical framework, leveraging both cooperative and non-cooperative sensory data to generate an avoidance volume, considering the performances of navigation and surveillance systems. Expanding upon this system, we address performance issues in data link and vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems, considering delays attributed to human response, negotiation for deconfliction, and command and control communication for unmanned aircraft. We propose methods to enhance communication system performance, including the development of a predictive algorithm that uses piecewise linear regression to predict transmission delays based on network load and the probability of success for packet reception, enabling real-time adjustments to minimize communication delays. We also investigated how the Joint Authorities for Rulemaking on Unmanned Systems (JARUS) automation framework can mitigate these communication delays and improve overall system performance. Additionally, we explore alternative communication technologies aimed at reducing position uncertainty arising from these delays. Finally, we present a simulation case study illustrating the impact of different communication technologies on cooperative separation and the minimum separation distance between Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). The results demonstrate significant reductions in position uncertainty through these enhancements, underscoring their potential to improve safety and efficiency in air transportation.