Tackling Air Traffic Conflicts as a Weighted CSP : Experiments with the Lumberjack Method
This work addresses air traffic management for operational safety, presenting an incremental improvement by hybridizing existing methods for better scalability in conflict resolution.
The paper tackles air traffic conflict resolution by extending a method to generate and select compatible trajectories, introducing a multi-maneuver approach that combines a novel 'smart brute-force' algorithm with the ToulBar2 CSP toolset. Experiments show the smart brute-force method is efficient for few aircraft (e.g., up to 6) but becomes complex with 7 or more, while ToulBar2 handles more aircraft with fewer trajectories within acceptable times.
In this paper, we present an extension to an air traffic conflicts resolution method consisting in generating a large number of trajectories for a set of aircraft, and efficiently selecting the best compatible ones. We propose a multimanoeuvre version which encapsulates different conflict-solving algorithms, in particular an original "smart brute-force" method and the well-known ToulBar2 CSP toolset. Experiments on several benchmarks show that the first one is very efficient on cases involving few aircraft (representative of what actually happens in operations), allowing us to search through a large pool of manoeuvres and trajectories; however, this method is overtaken by its complexity when the number of aircraft increases to 7 and more. Conversely, within acceptable times, the ToulBar2 toolset can handle conflicts involving more aircraft, but with fewer possible trajectories for each.