Abstract

ft conflict avoidance is a crucial issue arising in air traffic management. The problem is to keep a given separation distance for aircraft along their trajectories. We focus on an optimal control model based on speed regulation to achieve aircraft separation. We propose a solution strategy based on the decomposition of the problem and on the hybridization of a direct and an indirect method applied on the obtained subproblems. Numerical results show that the proposed approach is promising in terms of reduction of computing time for conflict avoidance.

Abstract

International audience; In this paper a numerical study is provided to solve the aircraft conflict avoidance problem through velocity regulation maneuvers. Starting from optimal controlbased model and approaches in which aircraft accelerations are the controls, and by applying the direct shooting technique, we propose to study two different largescale nonlinear optimization problems. In order to compare different possibilities of implementation, two environments (AMPL and MATLAB) and deterministic local optimization solvers are used. Numerical results are discussed. They show that the considered problem is really difficult to solve to global optimality, as different local minima are found using different methods.

Abstract

This article won two awards : Best of Session (SE/TFM) Award Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award; International audience; Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) aims at structuring traffic in order to reduce congestion in airspace. Congestion being linked to aircraft located at the same position at the same time, ATFM organizes traffic in the spatial dimension (e.g. route network) and/or in the time dimension (sequencing and merging in TMA, Miles-in-Trail for en-route airspace). The objective of this paper is to develop a methodology that allows the traffic to self-organize in the time dimension when demand is high. This structure disappears when the demand diminishes. In order to reach this goal, a multi-agent system has been developed. In this system, aircraft agents regulate speed and delay departure time in order to reduce the number of conflicts, thus decreases overall traffic complexity, which becomes easier to manage by air traffic controllers. This algorithm was applied on realistic examples.