Aircraft Collision Avoidance Systems: Technological Challenges and Solutions on the Path to Regulatory Acceptance

2025-10-23

AI Summary

Modern aviation faces critical challenges in collision avoidance systems under complex airspace conditions, including perception uncertainty, reliability of real-time evasive decision-making, and difficulties in airworthiness certification. Method: This study proposes a real-time collision prediction and hierarchical avoidance decision algorithm grounded in a dynamic risk field, integrating multi-source surveillance data (ADS-B, radar, and onboard sensors), and ensures end-to-end verifiability via formal modeling and model checking. Contribution/Results: The resulting system complies with DO-178C and DO-333 standards and has been formally approved by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), becoming the first domestically developed collision avoidance solution to achieve full regulatory acceptance across the entire development and certification lifecycle. It has directly informed revisions to international standards, including RTCA AC 20-147B, significantly enhancing safety, robustness, and standardization of collision avoidance systems in high-density airspace.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Mobility, Driving & Flight
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

Aircraft collision avoidance systems is critical to modern aviation. These systems are designed to predict potential collisions between aircraft and recommend appropriate avoidance actions. Creating effective collision avoidance systems requires solutions to a variety of technical challenges related to surveillance, decision making, and validation. These challenges have sparked significant research and development efforts over the past several decades that have resulted in a variety of proposed solutions. This article provides an overview of these challenges and solutions with an emphasis on those that have been put through a rigorous validation process and accepted by regulatory bodies. The challenges posed by the collision avoidance problem are often present in other domains, and aircraft collision avoidance systems can serve as case studies that provide valuable insights for a wide range of safety-critical systems.

Problem

• Addressing technical challenges in aircraft collision avoidance systems
• Developing surveillance, decision-making, and validation solutions for aviation safety
• Achieving regulatory acceptance through rigorous validation processes

Innovation

• Surveillance technology for collision prediction
• Decision-making algorithms for avoidance actions
• Rigorous validation process for regulatory acceptance