Minimum-Disclosure Civil-Military Deconfliction for UAS Traffic Management in Thailand: A Simulation Study
TL;DR
The findings support staged evaluation of a Thai UTM architecture in which safety decisions are shared but sensitive mission intent remains compartmented, satisfying a one-percentage-point engineering noninferiority margin while exposing no raw military trajectory states to the civil domain.
Abstract
Background: Unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) depends on information exchange for conflict management, yet civil-military coordination creates tension between safety visibility and operational security. Objective: This study develops and evaluates a trusted minimum-disclosure broker that computes on protected civil and military intent while releasing only a time-limited conflict token and safe-action advisory. Methods: A reproducible Monte Carlo experiment compared no cross-domain sharing, five-second delayed state sharing, full trajectory sharing, and the minimum-disclosure broker across three civil traffic densities, three service-latency levels, three navigation-error levels, and 250 replications per condition. Results: Across 27,000 policy evaluations, 72,446 encounter events generated 17,029 modeled conflicts before intervention. The broker left 2.60% unresolved (95% cluster-bootstrap interval: 2.36%–2.86%), compared with 2.43% for full sharing, 15.80% for delayed sharing, and 37.49% for no sharing. Its paired difference from full sharing was 0.17 percentage points (95% interval: −0.13 to 0.49), satisfying a one-percentage-point engineering noninferiority margin while exposing no raw military trajectory states to the civil domain. Conclusion: The findings support staged evaluation of a Thai UTM architecture in which safety decisions are shared but sensitive mission intent remains compartmented. Operational use requires hardware-in-the-loop, cybersecurity, and field validation.