Large scale aircraft conflict resolution based on location network

This paper proposes the method for solving large scale flight conflicts among multi-aircraft during the pre-tactical phase. Under the concept of the Trajectory-Based Operations (TBO), each aircraft is assigned a 4D trajectory to track. Therefore, with the position information obtained from the predicted 4D trajectory, potential conflicts are required to be resolved during the pre-tactical phase instead of the current tactical process. This long-term flight deconfliction induces a scale enlargement of flight conflicts, which sets a higher demand on the resolution method efficiency. Therefore, to reduce the conflict scale and enhance the deconfliction efficiency, we select critical aircraft with high potential conflict risks and only these key aircraft perform the deconfliction maneuver. The key aircraft are selected from the global perspective based on the location network which can characterize the structural characteristics of air traffic scenario. In this paper, the velocity adjustment is considered as the only admissible maneuver and the Aircraft Conflict Resolution (ACR) problem is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) problem to minimize the total flight time thus resolve all conflicts efficiently. Finally, simulation results illustrate the advantage of our approach in operational efficiency improvement and problem complexity reduction compared with the traditional method.