Lévy flight-based real-time bird strike risk assessment for airports

Abstract

Bird strike is a terrible but common incident in aviation. There is, however, a lack of systematic approaches for real-time bird strike risk assessment at present. This paper provides a novel method for bird strike risk assessment at airports with the detected data (e.g. data from radar systems), including the estimation of bird strike probability and collision severity. The Lévy flight model, an influential random walk model in bird foraging behaviour research, is adopted for the bird strike probability estimation. After dividing the area around the airport into a square matrix, the Lévy flight model is modified by the Chapman Kolmogorov equation. Meanwhile, the estimation of collision severity is based on the bird mass. The proposed method is applied to Dalian Zhoushuizi Airport with simulated bird data. The simulated results demonstrate the efficiency and real-time performance of our method.

Keywords:

• Lévy flight
• real time
• bird strike
• risk assessment
• airport

Acknowledgement

This work is jointly funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) (61079019). This work is also supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.