Adaptive Navigation Performance Evaluation Method for Civil Aircraft Navigation Systems with Unknown Time-Varying Sensor Noise

Abstract

During civil aviation flights, the aircraft needs to accurately monitor the real-time navigation capability and determine whether the onboard navigation system performance meets the required navigation performance (RNP). The airborne flight management system (FMS) uses actual navigation performance (ANP) to quantitatively calculate the uncertainty of aircraft position estimation, and its evaluation accuracy is highly dependent on the position estimation covariance matrix (PECM) provided by the airborne integrated navigation system. This paper proposed an adaptive PECM estimation method based on variational Bayes (VB) to solve the problem of ANP misevaluation, which is caused by the traditional simple ANP model failing to accurately estimate PECM under unknown time-varying noise. Combined with the 3D ANP model proposed in this paper, the accuracy of ANP evaluation can be significantly improved. This enhancement contributes to ensured navigation integrity and operational safety during civil flight.

Keywords

• actual navigation performance (ANP)
• required navigation performance (RNP)
• civil aircraft
• time-varying unknown noise
• position estimation covariance matrix (PECM)
• variational Bayesian (VB)