Conclusion

Trajectories play a crucial role in air traffic management systems to maintain an appropriate safety distance between aircraft. Their definition and representation can vary according to the specific needs of ATM players. A common representation is essential to exploit their full potential, offering a unified view of traffic between all players. This is essential to facilitate communication between players, based on shared information - unlike current practice - and thus speed up decision-making when trajectories need to be modified.

4D trajectories, which integrate the temporal dimension with the three spatial dimensions, are at the heart of the ATM system as an object of exchange and negotiation. Based on five key technological concepts (SWIM, FF-ICE, datalink, CPDLC and ADS-C), they are currently being prototyped to demonstrate their effectiveness, and are even...