Ad Hoc Distributed Model Predictive Control of Air Traffic Management

This paper develops an ad hoc distributed control algorithm for air traffic management. The method is based on model predictive control, in which aircraft use optimization to determine their own flight trajectories. The coordination approach of Self-organized Time Division Multiple Access is used to ensure no two aircraft re-optimize simultaneously, thus ensuring collision avoidance. Unlike existing distributed predictive control, which requires a pre-organized optimizing sequence, this new approach requires no central coordinator.