Merging and spacing of heterogeneous aircraft in support of nextgen

R. Chipalkatty; Philip Twu; Amir Rahmani; Magnus Egerstedt

doi:10.2514/1.54076

Merging and spacing of heterogeneous aircraft in support of nextgen

R. Chipalkatty, Philip Twu, Amir Rahmani, Magnus Egerstedt

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Federal Aviation Administration's NextGen program aims to increase the capacity of the national airspace, while ensuring the safety of aircraft. This paper provides a distributed merging and spacing algorithm that maximizes the throughput at the terminal phase of flight, using information communicated between neighboring aircraft through the ADS-B framework. Aircraft belonging to a mixed fleet negotiate with each other and use dual decomposition to reach an agreement on optimal merging times, with respect to a pairwise cost, while ensuring proper interaircraft spacing for the respective aircraft types. A set of sufficient conditions on the geometry and operating conditions of merging forks is provided to identify when proper interaircraft spacing can always be achieved using the proposed algorithm for any combination of merging aircraft. Also, optimal decentralized controllers are derived for merging air traffic when operating under such conditions. The performance of the presented algorithm is verified through computer simulations.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	1637-1646
Number of pages	10
Journal	Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics
Volume	35
Issue number	5
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.2514/1.54076
State	Published - 2012

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Control and Systems Engineering
Aerospace Engineering
Space and Planetary Science
Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Applied Mathematics

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abstract = "The Federal Aviation Administration's NextGen program aims to increase the capacity of the national airspace, while ensuring the safety of aircraft. This paper provides a distributed merging and spacing algorithm that maximizes the throughput at the terminal phase of flight, using information communicated between neighboring aircraft through the ADS-B framework. Aircraft belonging to a mixed fleet negotiate with each other and use dual decomposition to reach an agreement on optimal merging times, with respect to a pairwise cost, while ensuring proper interaircraft spacing for the respective aircraft types. A set of sufficient conditions on the geometry and operating conditions of merging forks is provided to identify when proper interaircraft spacing can always be achieved using the proposed algorithm for any combination of merging aircraft. Also, optimal decentralized controllers are derived for merging air traffic when operating under such conditions. The performance of the presented algorithm is verified through computer simulations.",

author = "R. Chipalkatty and Philip Twu and Amir Rahmani and Magnus Egerstedt",

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