Biasing XCS with Domain Knowledge for Planning Flight Trajectories in a Moving Sector Free Flight Environment

Free flight is a new concept in air traffic management, where pilots are given more freedom in making decisions in the cockpit. This allows air traffic controllers to manage more flights. One of the concepts under investigation in the Australian airspace is moving sectors, where an air traffic controller becomes responsible of a moving volume of the space containing a group of airplanes. Planning flight trajectories in this group is a hard problem. In this paper, we show that XCS can be used as a reliable planning tool. We also propose a novel idea for incorporating hard constraints within XCS to increase its reliability