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Trajectory deconfliction with constraint programming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2012

Nicolas Barnier  and
Cyril Allignol
Nicolas Barnier*
Affiliation:
École Nationale de l'Aviation Civile, 7 Av. Édouard Belin, 31055 Toulouse, France; e-mail: barnier@recherche.enac.fr
Cyril Allignol*
Affiliation:
Direction des Services de la Navigation Aèrienne/Direction de la Technique et de l’ Innovation, 7 Av. Édouard Belin, 31055 Toulouse, France; e-mail: allignol@tls.cena.fr
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Abstract

As acknowledged by the SESAR (Single European Sky ATM (Air Traffic Management) Research) program, current Air Traffic Control (ATC) systems must be drastically improved to accommodate the predicted traffic growth in Europe. In this context, the Episode 3 project aims at assessing the performance of new ATM concepts, like 4D-trajectory planning and strategic deconfliction.

One of the bottlenecks impeding ATC performances is the hourly capacity constraints defined on each en-route ATC sector to limit the rate of aircraft. Previous works were mainly focused on optimizing the current ground holding slot allocation process devised to satisfy these constraints. We propose to estimate the cost of directly solving all conflicts in the upper airspace with ground holding, provided that aircraft were able to follow their trajectories accurately.

We present a Constraint Programming model of this large-scale combinatorial optimization problem and the results obtained with the FaCiLe (Functional Constraint Library). We study the effect of uncertainties on the departure time and estimate the cost of improving the robustness of our solutions with the Complete Air Traffic Simulator (CATS). Encouraging results were obtained without uncertainty but the costs of robust solutions are prohibitive. Our approach may however be improved, for example, with a prior flight level allocation and the dynamic resolution of remaining conflicts with one of CATS’ modules.

Type
Articles
Information
The Knowledge Engineering Review , Volume 27 , Special Issue 3: Constraint Programming for Air Traffic Management , 26 July 2012 , pp. 291 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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