Autonomous Operation Mode of Aircrafts in Tube Air Corridor

To improve the operational efficiency of aircrafts in tube air corridor, reduce flight delays and conflicts, three representative aircraft operation modes were analyzed including, the speed-based mode, speed-independent mode and self-separation mode. Then, an autonomous operation model was built by simulation, and the correlation between important variables in the model were analyzed in a way of combining the Monte Carlo simulation and machine learning. Finally, the upper air route between Beijing Capital Airport and Guangzhou Baiyun Airport was selected as a study case. The regression models for all metrics were established and sensitivity analysis was conducted for the typical metrics of three modes. The results show that in the self-separation mode throughput and delay time are desirable while the conflict rate is relatively high with a minimum of 0.0361. The speed-independent mode leads to moderate results, which implies a low utilization of route resource with about 61.89% throughput of the self-separation mode. The speed-based mode lacks the functions of speed and separation adjustment, which is obviously affected by the initial separation.