Multi-agent systems for air traffic conflicts resolution by local speed regulation and departure delay

Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) aims at structuring traffic in order to reduce congestion in airspace. Congestion being linked to aircraft located at the same position at the same time, ATFM organizes traffic in the spatial dimension (e.g. route network) and/or in the time dimension (sequencing and merging in TMA, Miles-in-Trail for en-route airspace). The objective of this paper is to develop a methodology that allows the traffic to self-organize in the time dimension when demand is high. This structure disappears when the demand diminishes. In order to reach this goal, a multi-agent system has been developed. In this system, aircraft agents regulate speed and delay departure time in order to reduce the number of conflicts, thus decreases overall traffic complexity, which becomes easier to manage by air traffic controllers. This algorithm was applied on realistic examples.