Distributed Scheduling for Air Traffic Throughput Maximization During the Terminal Phase of Flight

© 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Presented at the 49th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, December 15-17, 2010, Hilton Atlanta Hotel, Atlanta, GA, USA.DOI: 10.1109/CDC.2010.5717934FAA’s NextGen program aims at increasing the capacity of the national airspace, while ensuring the safety of aircraft. This paper provides a distributed merging and spacing algorithm that maximizes the throughput at the terminal phase of flight using the information provided through the ADS-B framework. Using dual decomposition, aircraft negotiate with each other and reach an agreement on optimal merging times, with respect to an associated cost, that ensures proper inter-aircraft spacing. We provide a feasibility analysis that gives sufficient conditions to guarantee that proper spacing is achievable and derive maximum throughput controllers based on the air traffic characteristics of the merging flight path