Distributed scheduling for heterogeneous air traffic merging and spacing during the terminal phase of flight

Issued as final reportRockwell Collin

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

Air Traffic Maximization for the Terminal Phase of Flight Under FAA's NextGen Framework

© 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 29th IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), 3-7 October 2010, Salt Lake City, Utah.DOI: 10.1109/DASC.2010.5655490The NextGen program is the FAA's response to the ever increasing air traffic, that provides tools to increase the capacity of national airspace, while ensuring the safety of aircraft. In support of this vision, this paper provides a decentralized algorithm based on dual decomposition for safe merging and spacing of aircraft at the terminal phase of the flight. Aircraft negotiate optimal merging times that ensure safety, while penalizing deviations from the nominal path. We provide feasibility conditions for the safe merging of all incoming legs of flight and put the viability of the proposed algorithm to the test through simulations

Merging and Spacing of Heterogeneous Aircraft in Support of NextGen

© AIAA. The definitive version is available at: http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/1.54076DOI:10.2514/1.54076FAA’s NextGen program aims to increase 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 infor- mation communicated between neighboring aircraft through the ADS-B framework. Aircraft belonging to a mixed fleet negotiate with each other and use dual decomposi- tion to reach an agreement on optimal merging times, with respect to a pairwise cost, while ensuring proper inter-aircraft spacing for the respective aircraft types. A set of sufficient conditions on the geometry and operating conditions of merging forks are provided to identify when proper inter-aircraft spacing can always be achieved using the proposed algorithm for any combination of merging aircraft. Also, optimal de- centralized controllers are derived for merging air traffic when operating under such conditions. The performance of the presented algorithm is verified through computer simulations