Negotiated Decentralized Aircraft Conflict Resolution

This paper describes a sequential bargaining process that provides negotiated, decentralized aircraft conflict resolution. This process is decentralized in that it allows each aircraft to propose its own trajectories and assess their cost using its own private information. At each stage in the process, aircraft broadcast to each other proposed trajectories and then identify the response trajectories they would need to fly to avoid a conflict with the other’s proposed trajectories. If the cost of any response trajectory is less than or equal to its corresponding proposed trajectory, then a resolution has been found; otherwise, the process iterates with the requirement that the next set of proposed trajectories incur greater portions of the cost of resolving the conflict. Convergence of the process and methods for describing constraints on the trajectories is examined in computational experiments. Finally, the process is demonstrated in a large-scale simulation spanning an en route air traffic control center’s operations for five hours.