Efficient air traffic conflict resolution by minimizing the number of affected aircraft

Abstract

AbstractThe paper addresses local conflict resolution in dense air traffic scenarios. Currently, air traffic can reach a few thousands of aircraft airborne simultaneously over Europe or U.S., with predictions that it will grow significantly during the next two decades. All this traffic is expected to be organized well in advance and updated before take‐off, providing each aircraft a conflict‐free flight plan. Deviations from this plan, caused by the difference between the actual and predicted weather, equipment malfunctions, operational or airport delays, etc., may create in‐flight conflicts that will have to be resolved in a matter of minutes. Since real‐time re‐organization of the entire traffic is impractical due to high computational complexity, local re‐planning, affecting only the aircraft involved in the conflicts, is in order. In this paper we suggest a rapid local re‐planning algorithm. Its efficiency is attained by re‐computing new trajectories only for a minimal number of aircraft that resolves the conflicts. Finding optimal trajectories only for those aircraft not only reduces the computational effort, but also reduces average pilot workload. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.