A Systematic Analysis of Surface Trajectory Models

This paper presents a systematic analysis of different mathematical models of the surface trajectory process for use in planning and prediction. Components of the surface trajectory process are first discussed. Five models of different fidelity levels for aircraft dynamics are then derived that include rigid-body, point-mass, and kinematic models, and their differences explicitly stated. Models of motion intents and guidance strategies are studied next, followed by the modeling of pilot trajectory tracking actions. Numerical simulations are used to evaluate different model combinations of the pilot-aircraft system in terms of accuracy, computational speed, and feasibility constraint satisfaction. In general, a suitable model depends on the characteristics of the speed profiles it seeks to describe. Results of this paper lay a foundation to appropriate model selections for the surface trajectory process to support automated airport surface operations.