It’s well-known in the ATC world today that new entrants, particularly drones, represent a paradigm shift for aviation. While drones promise tangible benefits across public, military, and commercial use cases, unprecedented traffic volume in and near controlled airspace could be a huge disruption to traditional ATM.
Standards for aviation, airworthiness, and safety do not provide an adequate answer to ATM-UTM (Air Traffic Management– Unmanned Traffic Management) integration: segregation hinders fair and equitable airspace access and situational awareness apps, which are predominantly made up of lightweight cloud-based software technologies that do not go far enough in providing 2-way traffic coordination.
At Airspace World 2023 in Geneva, Switzerland Anaelle Le Mentec, product line manager for Thales UTM Solutions put forward key considerations for ANSPs and CAAs for the integration of UTM with ATM, alongside recent work conducted by Thales to unlock high-value drone operations.
Challenges
Safe ATM-UTM integration must consider:
1. Many-to-One Command-and-Control
Today highly trained air traffic controllers communicate with highly trained pilots to maintain a safe and secure airspace system. The drones of the near future will fly autonomously, operated by a remote pilot-in-command, who may be operating more than one aircraft at a time.
2. Evolution in Infrastructure
Existing ATM infrastructure is geographically limited and does not always provide adequate coverage of low-altitude airspace. Sensors used for weather detection may evolve to provide drones with detail, as drones are more sensitive to even slight changes in weather conditions. Also, because drones are remotely operated, drones rely on communications 88 AIR TRAFFIC TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL 2024
infrastructure for command and control.
3. Delegated Authority
As regulation evolves to integrate new entrants into the airspace system, some CAAs have delegated the delivery of certain drone services to other authorities. This distributed services model requires a more scalable and flexible ATM architecture.
4. Human-in-the-Loop
In traditional ATM, humans are at the core of every decision. But anticipated traffic volume for piloted aircraft and drones will force the human into a supervisory role, remaining “in-the-loop” but relying on some level of autonomy to assist with high-volume decision-making. Moreover, this must be accomplished without introducing additional workload for the air traffic controller.
5. Global Alignment of ConOps
While regulators worldwide have made great progress towards drone integration, a lot remains to be done when it comes to establishing globally recognized format and data exchange standards for ATM-UTM integration.
So how do we address these challenges? At Thales, we’ve already begun with promising demonstrations in Europe and North America in near-real conditions. We’re leveraging existing commercial ATM and UTM systems as well as a hybrid cloud to deliver a complete end-to-end environment at a high technology readiness level. Deploying services in the cloud allows us to integrate with existing data sources and operate in “shadow mode” for experiments. Through the following demonstrations, we tested concepts and gathered feedback to evolve the ATM-UTM integration concepts iteratively.
CLUE
For the Collaborative Low-altitude UAS Integration Effort (CLUE), Thales worked with the US Department of Defense to develop a ConOps and demonstrate coordinated airspace approvals, airspace alerts, SWIM integration, and automated safety nets for alerting ATCOs on the TopSky-ATC platform in the cloud (shadow mode).
SWIM node data exchange
At Lille Lesquin in the north of France, we integrated the SWIM node to enable data exchange between the UTM system and DSNA’s Irma 2000 approach system for the EU-funded PJ34 Cluster 3 with SESAR JU. Drone flights were tracked through remote ID with live conformance monitoring visualized on both the TTopSky - UAS Airspace Manager application and Irma 2000. We worked closely with tower supervisors and air traffic controllers to understand what exactly the air traffic controller wanted to see on this screen. For example, true drone positions were only displayed in instances of non-conformance. Several levels of alerts could be defined based on flight attributes and risk levels.
CISP testing
The EU-funded PJ34 Cluster 2 with SESAR JU involved working with HungaroControl in a controlled airspace environment in Budapest to test the EuroControl single Common Information Service Provider (CISP) concept.
The CISP acts as the single point of truth of the U-space environment, providing a complete view of the airspace and applicable rules. Thales’ TopSky - UAS Airspace Manager acted as the CISP, serving up traffic data and airspace awareness data that could be shared with the HungaroControl system. Two other industrials acted as USSPs for mission approval and conformance monitoring. In this experiment, a SWIM node was used between the CISP and USPs with the HungaroControl system.
Next steps
The journey is not over. We continue testing and evolving ATM-UTM integration concepts with ANSPs all over the world at our Thales SkyLab and SkyCentre locations and remotely, adapting the ConOps to the operational context.
We recognize four areas for improvement and development. The certification of technology requires regulation and data exchange standards to evolve so cloud technology can be leveraged alongside on-premise software while navigating data localization constraints.
The safety paradigm must be evolved and must remain the foundation and core focus of ATM-UTM integration. It is our obligation to consider how we can leverage new technology and architecture to improve aviation safety. ATM-UTM integration will also happen in phases over time. Successful ATM-UTM integration will depend upon how ANSPs and technology providers work together to manage change with practical and realistic timelines. This is key for acceptance and adoption.
This article was submitted by Thales and first appeared in Air Traffic Technology International 2024.
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