A scenario-based approach to robust Estimation of Air Traffic Flow Boundary

Estimation of Air Traffic Flow Boundary (EATFB) is at the core of conformance monitoring in Air Traffic Control (ATC) operations. Due to the impact of stochastic uncertainties on the real trajectories of air traffic flow flying along some nominal trajectory, a novel probabilistic flow boundary is proposed to address the robustness of the boundary. Then, we formulate the EATFB problem into a Chance-Constrained Optimization Program (C-COP). And a scenario-based approach is presented to approximately solve the C-COP with a predefined probabilistic guarantee. The efficacy of the proposed approach is verified by investigating both the horizontal and vertical profiles of air traffic flow based on the real ADS-B trajectory data. Moreover, the Monte Carlo method is adopted to further assess the robustness of the estimated boundary.