Application of distributed artificial intelligence in autonomous aircraft operations

Outlines the study of the application of distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) concepts and techniques in the development of algorithms and operational methods to support flight crew decision-aids for airborne separation assurance in autonomous aircraft operations (AAO). In the future envisaged for air traffic management (ATM), autonomous aircraft operations will be allowed in specifically allocated volumes of airspace. In AAO airspace, the aircraft will fly user-preferred routes and the responsibility for separation assurance will be fully transferred to the flight crew. To explore the potential of adopting a DAI approach to AAO, autonomous aircraft are modelled as agents and their interactions are considered in the context of a multi-agent system. In this framework, the aircraft-agents are willing to collaborate in the resolution of conflicts to coordinate their actions and share the costs of the conflict resolution. Thus, separation assurance in AAO is regarded as a co-operative process that takes place in a multi-agent system. A co-operation mechanism to support separation assurance for AAO with no point-to-point data-link communications facility is presented. The mechanism is based on automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) and relies on a trajectory-planning algorithm that is implemented on board the autonomous aircraft. The algorithm produces resolution manoeuvres that take into account the possible reactions of the conflicting aircraft to the selected resolution trajectory.