The Effects of Passive Coordination of Distributed Separation Assurance

This paper discusses an experiment to determine the effects of passive coordination on distributed separation assurance of aircraft. Both regionally centralized and airborne separation assurance paradigms are simulated in a common software testbed. In both of these cases, independent separation assurance agents do not communicate with one another. The surveillance range of each agent is varied to determine critical values. With no active coordination, both methods of separation assurance were able to resolve almost all conflicts. For the regionally centralized case, the extended surveillance range required to resolve all conflicts was approximately 20 nautical miles, and for the airborne case, the required sensing range was approximately 30 nautical miles.