An enhanced situational awareness design for airborne surveillance based on Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast

With the fast growth of general aviation, Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) becomes the direction of airspace surveillance development. The previous researches in surveillance field have managed to use ADS-B data to improve the performance of the integrated surveillance system, yet they have failed to consider ADS-B as a major source of data and will not be applicable when the general aviation is growing fast. The research of this paper proposes an enhanced situational awareness design based on ADS-B. With elective fusion based on surveillance quality, it helps to improve the performance when ADS-B data are taken as a major source of surveillance data. Several simulation scenarios with different surveillance quality are tested. The results show that the error is reduced and the overall surveillance performance is improved when surveillance quality is low. An integrated display is built for enhanced situational awareness display afterwards. With this enhanced situational awareness design, the pilots can be provided with a more comprehensive awareness of the airspace including general aviation aircrafts.