Distributed free-flow air traffic management system based on Nash equilibrium concept

Abstract

Future air traffic congestion is expected to significantly rise owing to the increase in the number of air travel passengers and the growth of small-sized airline market, which may not be adequately addressed by the current centralized air traffic management system. This thesis proposes a distributed traffic management algorithm based on the Nash equilibrium concept that can provide the traffic separation and urgency management capabilities under highly complex free-flow-traffic conflicts. The algorithm uses solution of 2-player Nash equilibrium to determine the amount of total deviation that a pair of conflicting agents should collectively make to avoid collision, which is finally allocated to each agent. The validity of the algorithm has been demonstrated through numerical simulations for traffic management of aircraft. The potential generalization of the proposed algorithm for vehicle types having various characteristics has been discussed.