Coordinated tactical air traffic and airspace management

Abstract

Air traffic management and airspace management reduce air traffic congestion to maintain safety. Managing traffic induces costs on airspace users and managing airspace causes additional work for air traffic controllers. This paper proposes and simulates algorithms for tactically reducing airspace congestion with coordinated air traffic and airspace management. A modified version of the Projective Cone Scheduling algorithm performs tactical air traffic management. An algorithm based on approximate dynamic programming accomplishes tactical airspace management. Three types of coordination between these air traffic and airspace management algorithms are investigated. Monte Carlo simulations of a simple problem instance involving severe congestion indicate that increased coordination between air traffic and airspace management can lead to lower costs with no increase in algorithm computation time.