Critical Observability and Hybrid Observers for Error Detection in Air Traffic Management

A particular problem in air traffic control management (ATM), the runway crossing control problem, is considered to motivate the extension of the notion of observability for hybrid systems to yield the notion of critical observability. In this problem, various agents are present, and some of them are humans, modelled as hybrid systems, subject to situation awareness errors that could lead to catastrophic events. The problem is to detect the errors immediately to prevent them to cause these catastrophic events. Hence, the classical notions of observability for hybrid systems need to be extended to consider critical observability, whereby hazardous states have to be detected in one step of the finite-state machine component of the hybrid system. Conditions for the existence of an observer for critical states are also given and a procedure for its computation presented