Towards an Automatic Air Traffic Controller

摘要

The current Air Traffic Management System (ATMS) relies mainly upon human Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs) to solve conflicts between aircraft plans. Due to the increasing traffic, the workload of centralized ATCs will be soon too heavy to handle. A new generaton of ATMS is urged to guarantee the safety of future travelers and to reduce financial loss due to ATC-caused delays. The ATMS presented in this paper is based on a Distributed Automatic Air Traffic Controller (DAATC). It solves automatically a large number of conflicts for the global system by synchronizing in a near optimal way, independent solutions computed for different parts of the system. Safety is permanently guaranteed while the system solves most of its conflicts in a decentralized way, including efficiency and fairness as criteria.