Constrained Path Problems in Air Traffic Management

Free Flight is a new concept to enhance the capacity and efficiency of the air traffic system. It would allow aircraft to fly more fuel-efficient routes instead of following the "highway in the sky" potentially saving billions of dollars each year.

In Free Flight, considerably more autonomy will be granted to individual aircraft, using a more passive control mechanism, with controllers intervening only in exceptional cases. As a result, maintaining or enhancing the safety is top priority as the capacity and efficiency of the air traffic system is increased.

Critical to the safety of such a new system is the use of instrumentation and software to detect potential conflicts between aircraft before they occur, and to plan negotiated alternative routes to resolve any such conflicts.

We study computational geometric approach to solve such conflict detection and resolution problems. Simple geometric hashing approach is devised for the conflict detection problem, and space time flow approach is used to solve the conflict resolution problem. We also study the problem of routing aircraft in the vicinity of an airport, using weather radar data to plan routes that avoid heavy weather in the best possible manner, while obeying constraints that govern the aircraft.

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