A distributed air traffic flow management model for European functional airspace blocks

Functional airspace blocks (FAB) concept is adopted by the European airspace to allows cooperation between airspace users to manage the air traffic flow, while ensuring efficiency, safety, and fairness without constraints of geographical boundaries. This integration of airspace introduces more flexibility to manage aircraft trajectory and airspace usage. In this paper, we propose a distributed air traffic flow management model to address four-dimensional trajectory planning over the European FAB. The goal is to enable effective information sharing between airspace blocks in strategic planning, and to minimize interaction between trajectories. The proposed model and overall methodology is implemented and tested with a full day air traffic data over the European airspace. Interaction-free 4D trajectories are produced within computational time acceptable for the operational context, which shows the viability of the distributed model and interaction minimization approach for effective FAB implementation.