Safety-capacity trade-off and phase transition analysis of automated separation assurance concepts

Novel airspace concepts are proposed to provide higher levels of airspace capacity in order to accommodate increased demand for airspace resources. These concepts move the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system towards a more automated system with tightly coupled operations and define new roles for human operators. With higher levels of automation, comes greater demand for reliability and avoiding instances of closer-to-hazardous situations. Different concepts propose fundamentally different system architectures and roles for human operators. Investigating the trade-off between safety and capacity can guide the selection of different capacity enhancing concepts for further development. Furthermore, these studies can identify critical points of failure and help researchers to refine the systems´ architecture and add safely nets to achieve higher levels of reliability. We present a framework for computing safety-capacity curves and analyzing conditions under which the relationship between safely and capacity changes or when a phase transition occurs.