Air traffic management complexity maps induced by degradation of communication, navigation and surveillance

The introduction of new technologies and concepts of operation in the air transportation system is not possible, unless they can be proven not to adversely affect the system operation under not only nominal, but also degraded conditions. In extreme scenarios, degraded operations due to partial or complete technological failures should not endanger system safety. Many past system evolutions, whether ground-based or airborne, have been based on trial-and-error, and system safety was addressed only after a specic event yielded dramatic or near-dramatic consequences. Future system evolutions, however, must leverage available computation, prior knowledge and abstract reasoning to anticipate all possible system degradations and prove that such degradations are graceful and safe. Building upon prior research efforts, this paper is concerned with evaluating the ability for a given airspace structure to handle traffic not only under nominal, but also degraded surveillance conditions. Given a traffic configuration in a center, we leverage our ability to evaluate the sensitivity of a given airspace configuration to surveillance degradation to build a "degradation map", that covers the entire center and identifies the areas where it is most prone to "disgraceful degradation". We introduce "dynamic degradation maps" that allow us to monitor the airspace and propose a smooth transition from nominal to degraded operations in the event of a CNS degradation. © 2008 by the authors.