Projecte assignat

Títol: Risk-Based Assessment of Strategic Flight Plan Interactions for Capacity Enhancement in U-space

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Director/a: PASTOR LLORENS, ENRIC

Departament: DAC

Títol: Risk-Based Assessment of Strategic Flight Plan Interactions for Capacity Enhancement in U-space

Data inici oferta: 10-07-2026     Data finalització oferta: 10-03-2027

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Estudis d'assignació del projecte:

GR ENG SIS TELECOMUN
GR ENG SIST AEROESP
GR ENG TELEMÀTICA

Tipus: Individual

Lloc de realització: EETAC

Paraules clau:

U-space, collision risk

Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:

One of the main challenges in the deployment of U-space is achieving an appropriate balance between operational safety and airspace capacity. Current strategic deconfliction mechanisms rely on the use of protection volumes surrounding each approved flight plan. These volumes account for the uncertainty associated with trajectory execution and provide conservative safety margins to prevent potential conflicts between aircraft. However, the resulting protected airspace is often significantly larger than the nominal trajectory itself, leading to poor airspace utilization. Consequently, only a limited number of simultaneously approved operations may occupy a substantial portion of the available airspace, reducing the scalability of future U-space services. The proposed project is based on the hypothesis that not every intersection between the protection volumes of two flight plans represents the same operational risk. While current strategic conflict management approaches generally reject any overlap between protected volumes, many of these interactions may only produce a negligible increase in collision risk due to the geometry of the trajectories, the temporal characteristics of the overlap, the relative motion of the aircraft, or the duration of the potential conflict. Exploiting these differences could enable more efficient use of the airspace without compromising an acceptable level of safety. The main objective of the project is to develop a risk-based framework for classifying the interactions between the protection volumes associated with two strategic flight plans. The work will investigate different categories of potential interactions, considering factors such as crossing versus parallel trajectories, relative heading, duration of the overlap, overlap volume, temporal synchronization, and other geometric or operational characteristics that may influence the actual probability of conflict. Based on this classification, the project will evaluate the risk associated with each interaction type and investigate under which conditions specific classes of low-risk overlaps could be accepted during the strategic planning phase. To achieve these objectives, the student will develop geometric analysis algorithms and simulation tools capable of generating representative flight scenarios and quantifying the characteristics of protection volume intersections. Different risk metrics will be analysed and correlated with the interaction taxonomy to estimate the impact of allowing selected classes of overlaps. The resulting framework will then be used to evaluate the trade-off between the increase in U-space capacity and the corresponding variation in operational risk. The expected outcome of the project is a methodology capable of supporting next-generation strategic deconfliction algorithms that move beyond binary conflict detection towards risk-aware decision making. Such an approach could contribute to significantly improving U-space capacity while preserving the high safety standards required for large-scale drone operations.

Orientació a l'estudiant:

Horari d'atenció a estudiants per a l'assignació de projecte: 9:00 - 14:00

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