A Centralized Multi-Agent Negotiation Approach to Collaborative Air Traffic Resource Management Planning

Abstract

Demand and capacity imbalances in the US national airspace are resolved using traffic management initiatives designed, in current operations, with little collaboration with the airspace users. NASA and its partners have developed a new collaborative concept of operations that requires the users and airspace service provider to work together to choose initiatives that better satisfy the business needs of the users while also ensuring safety to the same standard as today. In this paper, we describe an approach to implementing this concept through a software negotiation framework underpinned by technology developed in the artificial intelligence community. We describe our exploration of peer-to-peer negotiation and how the number of conversation threads and the time sensitivity of offer acceptance led us to a centralized approach. The centralized approach uses hill climbing to evaluate airport slot allocations from a user perspective and a linear programming solver to seek solutions compatible across the user community. Our experiments with full sized problems identify the potential operational benefits as well as limitations, and where future research needs to be focused.

Review on artificial intelligence techniques for improving representative air traffic management capability

“…The studies that applied AI techniques to ATC, and the applied techniques, are listed in Table 2. The current ATC system was developed over time to meet the users' needs with respect to modern technology, and it has performed remarkably well [43,44]. However, with the rapid increase in the number of flights and with increasing shortage of airspace resources, the demand for high-performance ATC systems has been increasing.…”