Continous time autonomous air traffic control for non-towered airports

The majority of reported near mid-air collisions that involve a general aviation aircraft (GA) occur in the vicinity of non-towered airports. In this paper, we propose a concept for air traffic collision prevention for GA aircraft, which can be modeled as a continuous-time Markov decision process (CTMDP). The problem is equivalent to controlling independent homogeneous multi-agents under communication or resource constraints. We outline a methodology that leverages the structure of the problem to efficiently solve it despite the large state space. Finally, we present simulation results for aircraft operating under the optimized policies in the traffic pattern.