Joint Metering and Conflict Resolution in Air Traffic Control

This paper describes a novel optimization-based approach to conflict resolution in air traffic control, based on geometric programming. A key feature of this approach is its ability to also take into account various metering directives issued by the traffic flow management level, in contrast to most methods that focus purely on aircraft separation issues. Moreover, the proposed methodology can account for some of the nonlinearities present in the formulations of conflict resolution problems, while incurring only a small penalty in computation time with respect to the fastest linear-programming-based approaches. Integer variables can be introduced to improve the quality of the solutions and to include combinatorial choices, for example, to optimize over aircraft sequences in merging streams. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the approach on various aircraft separation problems, including miles-in-trail and minutes-in-trail restrictions through airspace fixes and boundaries.