Assessing the operational benefits of Automated Conformance Monitor for RNP-to-Final operations

Advanced flight deck capabilities such as Required Navigation Performance (RNP) provide a foundation for achieving operational benefits in the National Airspace System (NAS). To support these benefits, the MITRE Corporation is studying automation for air traffic controllers that will improve situational awareness and will complement the flight deck-based integrity of the operation. Among the automation capabilities being studied, Automated Conformance Monitor (ACM) is a proposed automation enhancement that would detect if an aircraft has deviated or is predicted to deviate from its assigned route. In such cases, an alert is generated to the controller. An ACM algorithm was developed as part of previous work [1]. This report describes a Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) study that was performed to assess the operational benefit of ACM for PBN approach operations. The PBN operation used is called “Required Navigation Performance (RNP)-to-Final”. In this study, a number of aircraft in each scenario were blundered laterally from their assigned route and data collected on how long it took controllers to issue a corrective action to the aircraft under different conformance monitoring support conditions. Objective and subjective data are presented as well as a discussion of the results and future work.