Distributed Air Traffic Control : A Human Safety Perspective

Abstract: The issues in air traffic control have so far been addressed with the intent to improve resource utilization and achieve an optimized solution with respect to fuel comsumption of aircrafts, efficient usage of the available airspace with minimal congestion related losses under various dynamic constraints. So the focus has almost always been more on smarter management of traffic to increase profits while human safety, though achieved in the process, we believe, has remained less seriously attended. This has become all the more important given that we have overburdened and overstressed air traffic controllers managing hundreds of airports and thousands of aircrafts per day. We propose a multiagent system based distributed approach to handle air traffic ensuring complete human (passenger) safety without removing any humans (ground controllers) from the loop thereby also retaining the earlier advantages in the new solution. The detailed design of the agent system, which will be easily interfacable with the existing environment, is described. Based on our initial findings from simulations, we strongly believe the system to be capable of handling the nuances involved, to be extendable and customizable at any later point in time.