Alerting Threshold Analysis of TCAS

ABSTRACT

A method for the setting and evaluation of TCAS (Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System) alerting threshold is proposed in this paper. Firstly, by analyzing the error and uncertainty of the flight path, a stochastic differential equation is introduced to model the random aircraft motion. Then a pilot model according to ICAO standards is given to simulate the TCAS alert event. And then five kinds of alarm outputs are summed up by analyzing the principle of TCAS alerting function. Finally, the evaluation system with multiple variables is established on System Operating Characteristic (SOC) curve. The validation of the Encounter model is performed under different parameters. Through the simulation under different threshold values, the optimal alerting threshold values are obtained. The experiments show the rationality of the TCAS threshold and verify the validity of our threshold-setting method.

Keywords:

TCAS (Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System), Alerting threshold, System Operating Characteristic (SOC) curve.