Airport Ground Position Tracking and Notification System
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current flight tracking systems primarily focus on aircraft operations from take-off to landing, leaving a gap in tracking and reporting ground operations such as taxiing, fueling, and de-icing, which are significant portions of an aircraft's total time, and do not provide comprehensive insights into ground-based airport vehicle activities.
Innovation Solution
A system and method for collecting and processing positional data from remote data acquisition sites using ADS-B and ASDE-X systems to identify ground-based events and transmit notifications to users, extending flight tracking to encompass all ground operations and including other airport vehicles.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Device complexity
If flight tracking systems focus only on take-off to landing operations, then the system complexity remains manageable, but ground operation tracking capability is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The tracking system is extended to perform multiple functions: it now tracks both airborne operations (take-off to landing) and ground operations (taxiing, fueling, de-icing, parking). The same infrastructure (ADS-B receivers, processing systems) handles both aerial and ground-based aircraft activities, making the system universal and eliminating the need for separate ground tracking systems.
2Productivity
If comprehensive ground operation tracking is implemented, then operational efficiency is improved, but data processing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts and filters only the specific ground operation events of interest (taxiing, fueling, de-icing, parking) from the continuous stream of ADS-B data. By focusing on key event detection rather than processing all raw data, the system achieves comprehensive ground tracking while managing data processing complexity through selective extraction of relevant information.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements automated notification that provides feedback to users about ground operation status. This automated feedback loop eliminates manual reporting requirements and improves operational efficiency by keeping stakeholders informed in real-time about aircraft ground activities without requiring human intervention for each status update.
3Ease of manufacture
If manual reporting methods are used for ground operations, then system implementation is simple, but time consumption and labor burden increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system enables self-service automated tracking where the ADS-B infrastructure and processing system automatically detect, record, and report ground operation events without human intervention. Aircraft equipped with ADS-B transponders self-report their position and status, and the system automatically processes this data to generate notifications, eliminating the need for manual reporting by ground crew or flight coordinators.
Data Source
AI summary
A computer-implemented system and method processes position information for aircraft located on the ground and provides a notification to a remote user in response to a triggering event. Typically, aircraft position data is received over a digital network. The service accepts requests for notification associated with an identified aircraft and subsequently provides notifications of events based upon the aircraft position data. Upon receiving a user query, a server subsequently retrieves a result set from the aircraft ground position data and determines if an event associated with the identified aircraft has occurred and if so, triggers the notification. In one form, the requested notification may be presented to the user in the form of an HTML message or update, e-mail, telephone call, text message or the some other electronic transmission or message.