Estimation of Mid-Air Collision Risk in Regional Air Traffic Environments

Safety of civil aviation is a key element of modern air transportation system. Any services in civil aviation should be provided based on ensuring minimum required level of flight safety. Common safety model aggregates risk of each dangerous factor’s influence into nominal intelligent transport system operation. Advanced safety level evaluation could include the full tree model of risk formation. One of the most significant risks in the safety basket is risk of mid-air collision. Air transportation demonstrates a clear visible trend in increasing air transportation services that require to increase number of airplanes simultaneously placed in a particular defined airspace volume. Further growth in air traffic will require increasing airspace load while simultaneously guaranteeing required level of flight safety. In this paper, we present results of a study of two collision risk models that could be applied for airspace analysis. One model considers airspace volume, and the other is based on aggregation of vertical and horizontal planes. Also, a hierarchical hexagonal spatial indexing system is used to identify conflict pairs of airplanes, which is computationally light for various applications. Proposed approach could be useful for collaborative decision-making in infrastructure system of civil aviation. Validation of proposed approach is done with surveillance data obtained based ADS-B technology for airspace of France.