Does ATM Need Centralized Coordination? Autonomous Conflict Resolution Analysis in a Constrained Speed Environment

Abstract

The concept of free-flight, introduced in the 1990s, opened a debate on the efficiency of letting aircraft deal with conflicts without any centralized control. Many models have been proposed for autonomous aircraft solvers, but their efficiency is not well-known. In this paper we experiment with a powerful algorithm derived from robotics, which can deal with thousands of robots in very small spaces and show how its performance plummets when speeds are constrained. We also compare this autonomous algorithm with a centralized approach using evolutionary computation on a complex example to point out their relative performance in a constrained speed environment. This comparison provides scientific arguments for the need for centralized air traffic control.