Air Traffic Control Area Configuration Advisories from Near-Optimal Distinct Paths

Abstract

Area of specialization supervisors dynamically configure available air traffic control resources so that air traffic can operate safely and efficiently. It is proposed to assist supervisors with this process by presenting them with a set of near-optimal and meaningfully different configuration advisories. To find such a set of advisories, a problem is defined that is equivalent to finding optimal and other near-optimal and distinct paths in a time-expanded graph. It is shown that this problem is nondeterministic polynomial-time hard, and then four algorithms are motivated and specified. One is a benchmark that solves the problem to optimality, one is a novel heuristic based on value iteration, and a third is a novel heuristic based on the algorithm. The fourth algorithm solves to optimality the lowest-cost paths problem relaxation of the problem. When used to solve realistic problem instances, the lowest-cost paths algorithm rarely returned feasible solutions and the optimal algorithm required excessive computation times, but the two novel heuristics found feasible and often optimal solutions in just a few seconds. The -based heuristic achieved lower computation times, whereas the value iteration-based heuristic typically found more advisories and lower-cost advisories.