AMELIORATING AERIAL NEAR MISSES WITH PCA DEVICES AND MOTL

Author

Naren Bhosle, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

1-1-2009

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

HEXMOOR, HENRY

Abstract

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF Naren Bhosle, for the Masters of Science degree in Computer Science, presented on March 02, 2009, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: AMELORIATING AERIAL NEAR MISSES WITH PCA DEVICES AND MOTL MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Henry Hexmoor A near miss is an unplanned event in air traffic that does not result in direct injury, illness or material damage. However, since an air craft come close to one another, there is threat of collision. An immediate consequence of near miss is tremendous psychological fear. Near misses are headline news and each case is investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Every pilot during flying hours has to record near misses. Although human error is commonly an initiating event, a faulty process or system invariably permits or compounds the harm, and should be the focus of improvement. Statistics tell us that for every 300 near misses there is one serious injury. To help every pilot to navigate with ease and to avoid collision and reduce the number of near misses, public collision avoidance systems are inexistence. There are many Commercial Collision Avoidance Systems exist such as Airborne Collision Avoidance System (ACAS), Beacon-based Collision Avoidance System (BCAS), Air Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), Air Traffic Controller (ATC), Portable Collision Avoidance System (PCAS), etc,. Portable Collision Avoidance System as it is a decentralized system and has many benefits. Our objective is to count the number of near misses and to calculate the efficiency of a Portable Collision Avoidance System. Our inputs to achieve my objective would be a PCAS plus Flight simulator environment. We would like to simulate the environment using Net Logo. In this simulation we would compute the relative locations of the flights and check whether it can be considered as a near miss. Finally, we would like to enumerate the results in presence of a Portable Collision Avoidance System and in absence of it. With the help of which we can tell, to what level does a Portable Collision Avoidance System yields a good result when compared to the environment with the absence of PCAS.