Autonomous Operations Planner: A Flexible Platform for Research in Flight-Deck Support for Airborne Self-Separation

The Autonomous Operations Planner (AOP), developed by NASA, is a flexible and powerful prototype of a flight-deck automation system to support self-separation of aircraft. It incorporates a variety of algorithms to detect and resolve conflicts between the trajectories of its own aircraft and traffic aircraft while meeting route constraints such as required times of arrival and avoiding airspace hazards such as convective weather and restricted airspace. This integrated suite of algorithms provides flight crew support for strategic and tactical conflict resolutions and conflict-free trajectory planning while en route. Versions of AOP have supported an extensive set of experiments covering various conditions and variations on the self-separation concept, yielding insight into the system’s design and resolving various challenges encountered in the exploration of the concept. The design of AOP will enable it to continue to evolve and support experimentation as the self-separation concept is refined.