A case study of a real-time problem solving strategy in an air traffic control problem

Abstract

Air traffic control (ATC) requires real-time problem solving combined with human knowledge. We present one real-time expert system in the ATC field as a case study in choosing real-time problem solving strategies. We propose a real-time search algorithm, “Time Dependent Heuristic Search” (TDHS), for obtaining at least one solution by a deadline. The usefulness of TDHS is verified in experiments with an ATC problem testbed named “AirTFM”. AirTFM is also designed to work with human controllers to help control schedule execution, letting human controllers explore plans and decide on the best modification to the original plans.