Overview
INTERVUSE is a project funded by the EC to support a new direction in surface movement ground control system (SMGCS) solutions, which is cost-effective, innovative, and suitable to fill blind spots in the SMGCS technology developed so far. Air traffic management today faces two major bottlenecks in the capacity of manageable traffic load:
- Limited airspace usage caused by restricted airways and corridors instead of free flight
- Limited traffic throughput on ground caused by insufficient technical support with ground control systems.
For these reasons, the EC has sponsored a number of projects to improve European airspace and traffic management infrastructure and to increase worldwide competitiveness.
- Provision of a low-cost solution for SMGCS by combination of radar tracking, flight plan processing and digital video processing (capable of integrating with SMR), which makes SMGCS affordable and thus available to a broader range of airports.
- Provision of a scalable package of VBED and VSDF to cover blind spots in a total SMGCS.
- Analysis of downgrading of digital video processing for various weather and light conditions with an online quality control and analysis module.
- Combination of new sensors (digital cameras) into multi-sensor data fusion for SMGCS.
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Combination of Discrete Kalman Filtering (DKF) - based tracking techniques with:
- Video processing with virtual detectors
- Event state vector extraction algorithms
- Positioning techniques
- State vector quality determination and error propagation
- State vector accuracy/reliability probability estimation - Provision of an intelligent tool / system solution to support safe transportation at airports.
The project was approched in different steps:
the development the system architecture and technical requirements and the overall system design for both test sites.
Software Development
Preparation of sites
Integration at site
- Tests at site
Funding
Results
The project results indicate that INTERVUSE technology can achieve most of the performance requirements of a Surface Movement Radar (SMR). Specifically, the strengths of the system are:
- No radiation
- Lower cost
- Provision of video
- Higher update rate
Technical Implications
Video cameras can provide a useful contribution to airport surveillance and that the technology developed in INTERVUSE project has the potential to be a gap-filler to complement Surface Movement Radar (SMR).