A technique for improving conflict alerting performance in the context of runway incursions

Abstract

An effective solution to the problem of runway incursions is long overdue. To date, an average of a thousand incursions are registered yearly in the United States alone, with similar figures registed in Europe. Installing a system on-board aircraft capable of providing an alert in the case of a runway incursion has the potential of significantly reducing this. As with any conflict detection and alerting system, the difficulty lies in the fine-tuning of the parameters which define a conflict, in effect resulting in finding the right trade-off between false and missed detections and associated alerts. This is an important consideration in the design of any conflict detection system and is key in the context of runway incursion alerting where aircraft would be travelling at high speed and in close proximity of eachother. This paper addresses this problem by providing an assessement on the effects of false and missed detections in the event of a runway incursion and provides mathematical tools for tuning the conflict detection boundaries.