Probability of conflict analysis of 3D aircraft flight based on two-level Markov chain approximation approach

This paper introduces a new approach of Markov chain approximation for the reachability analysis of stochastic systems and particularly for computing the probability of conflict during aircraft flight. Two-level Markov chains are designed to achieve a better compromise between accuracy and computation time compared with the one-level Markov chain approximation. We used a simplified aircraft dynamics model of the aircraft-to-airspace conflict prediction problem. However, the new approach in this paper can also be applied to the aircraft-to-aircraft conflict prediction problem. Numerical example is studied to analyze the probability of conflict using the two-level Markov chain approximation. The results show that the approach obtains accurate estimation of the probability of conflict with an acceptable running time.