Space indexed flight guidance along air streams

In this study a new approach to traffic organization in dense areas compatible with the current performances of aeronautical communication, navigation and surveillance systems, has been proposed. The objective here has been to complement the free flight and traffic management through trajectory negotiation approaches, by introducing new high density traffic links organized in a way limiting traffic conflicts. Then in this paper it has been proposed to organize traffic in congested airspace along main air streams which are characterized by a central 3D track which acts as a common space indexed reference for the involved aircraft which follow lanes associated with different aircraft performances (preferred speeds and flight levels). Guidance objectives have been expressed with respect to the common spatial reference offered by an ASRT and the synthesis of guidance control laws based on nonlinear inversion has been considered. Then the case of lane shift along a common air stream has been considered, leading to the complete characterization of the resulting trajectories. This allows to manage the traffic inside the airstream by predicting the duration of lane shift manoeuvers and using the common spatial reference to prevent conflicts. Then the assignment of conflict free trajectories to transient flights inside the air stream can be performed using different techniques including heuristics. Preliminary concepts have been introduced in this paper to support this idea and many complementary studies should be developed to prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach.