Probabilistic Aircraft Midair Conflict Resolution Using Stochastic Optimal Control

This paper studies the problem of aircraft midair conflict resolution, which is a key technology to enable the coordinated and decentralized air traffic control envisioned in the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). The method proposed in this paper is based on stochastic optimal control, which is able to incorporate uncertainties in both aircraft and wind dynamics. The proposed numerical algorithm uses a Markov chain (MC) to approximate the continuous-time aircraft and wind dynamics, then the optimal control law is derived based on the MC. The proposed algorithm is able to resolve the conflicts between aircraft and moving convective weather regions. For conflict resolution between pairs of aircraft, a decomposition technique is proposed to reduce the computational complexity of the numerical algorithm. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm provides robustness against uncertainties in the system and is suitable for real applications.