ERASMUS

POM : Planification, Optimization, and Modelization

The project

ERASMUS (En-Route Air Traffic Soft Management Ultimate System) is a project financed by the European Commission. The main idea, from which the project started, is to design a centralized system which would detect aircraft with conflicting trajectories, and would solve these conflicts using speed regulations, when this is possible. In the cases where speed adjustments are not sufficient to solve a conflit, the air traffic controller would then be in charge of the conflict resolution, using lateral or vertical manoeuvres.

ERASMUS may be seen as a filter applied to a traffic situation, aiming at reducing its complexity for the controller. There may be several ways to insert this new filter in the current working methods:

• the action of ERASMUS on the traffic may be subliminal: controllers are not aware of the small speed adjustments made by the system, and only see a "lucky" traffic which seems more fluid as some potential conflicts are already solved by the ERASMUS filter. This filter operates within the uncertainty margins that controllers have in their perception of aircraft speeds.
• Alternatively, the ERASMUS system may also advise the controller of its actions, or even ask explicitely for the controller's approval.
• In any case, conflicts which cannot be solved by speed adjustments shall be handled by the controller, and solved by lateral or vertical manoeuvres. ERASMUS, in its current version, does not propose any solution in this case, but only provides conflict detection support.

For more details, see the ERASMUS website, and also the presentation at the ATC Maastricht Exhibition, or else the DSNA letter (may/june 2006), in french.

POM contribution

The conflict resolution algorithms developped within the ERCOS research project, first within the LOG and now by the POM team, have been tuned for speed resolution only (see project SAGES ) and are now at the core of the ERASMUS system. In collaboration with the ERASMUS partners and with the other teams of DSNA / R&D, POM contributes to the adaptation of these algorithms to the objectives of ERASMUS. More accurate trajectories issued from aircraft FMS (Flight Management Systems) should be used in the algorithms.

The ERASMUS consortium

• Eurocontrol (Brétigny experimental center)
• DGAC/DSNA (France)
• The Honeywell corporation,
• The university of Linkoping (Suède)
• The university of Zurich (Suisse)

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