Under trajectory-based operation (TBO) circumstance, 4-dimensional aircraft trajectories are defined in advance and aircraft follow these planned trajectories accurately in their actual flights. Researches on TBO have been conducted so as to meet the increasing air traffic demand and realize efficient operations in this circumstance. As a part of these studies, automatic detection and resolution algorithms for potential conflicts in about 20 minutes are also studied.

We first discussed about whether aircraft trajectories are approximated by piecewise polynomials. We developed a new conflict detection algorithm based on Strum’s real root counting theorem, which claims the number of real roots of a univariant polynomial. It assumes that aircraft trajectories are approximated by piecewise polynomials.

air traffic management, conflict detection.