Self-Organizational Approach for Resolving Air Traffic Conflicts

摘要

The use of airways and navigational fixes to form fixed routes in the sky iscentral to modern-day air traffic control (ATC). This article describes a computational technique for determining collision-free time/space paths for multiple vehicles without the use of fixed routes. The technique applies a simple destination-seeking rule and a few conflict-avoidance algorithms to each vehicle individually such that the collective solution is determined by the calculated behavior of the individual vehicles; the overall solutions are self-organizational in nature. This self-organizational approach has been tested in a variety of scenarios ranging from simple two-dimensional conflicts to the modeling of an ATC sector handling an unrealistically high traffic load. The simulations, implemented on a very modest computer workstation, have proven the self-organizational approach capable of finding solutions to complex traffic conflicts at rates faster than real time.