Noncooperative conflict resolution [air traffic management]

Next generation air traffic management will allow for the possibility of free flight, in which each aircraft chooses its own optimal route, altitude and speed. In a free flight environment, the trajectories of several aircraft may be conflicting, in which case aircraft may or may not cooperate in resolving the conflict. This paper presents a method for noncooperative conflict resolution in which each aircraft develops a resolution strategy for the worst possible actions (within known bounds) of the other aircraft. The resolution strategy is based on noncooperative game theory: the solution to the game partitions the state space of each aircraft into safe and unsafe sets which represent level sets of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, and the control strategies are abstracted into discrete protocols within each partition. Two examples of conflict resolution using speed and heading changes are worked out in detail.