Free flight ATC using hybrid agent systems

This paper presents a system for on-board, agent based, nearly autonomous free flight air traffic control. The proposed system implements a decision agent in each aircraft; responsible for the real-time generation of a trajectory in a predefined inertial-time domain such as the airspace within 300 miles of an airport. The feasible trajectories for all the aircraft in the domain are suitably defined geodesic curves determined by a metric associated with an agent's Lagrangian.