Display of Traffic Intent Information on Surface Moving Maps

Abstract

To foresee and avoid potential conflicts on the ground is a major safety issue for today’s airports in the face of runway incursions. Surface moving maps can support pilots’ awareness by providing positional information on own-ship and other traffic. While this is surely of great help to detect potential conflicts it does not promote the human need to predict future developments, as only current status information is presented at the moment. The display of traffic intent information, e.g. a prediction of future own-ship and positions of other traffic, is a new concept that has been developed and tested for free flight operations. Now the first attempt was made to transfer this concept to surface moving maps. This paper will elaborate on why information about future developments is crucial for operators in safety-critical environments. It will further provide a short introduction on the status quo of traffic intent information research and finally present open questions on the display of intent information to be tackled by future research.