Collision Avoidance in the ATM Problem: A Mixed Integer Linear Optimization Approach

Abstract

This paper tackles the collision avoidance problem in ATM. The problem consists in deciding the best strategy for new aircraft configurations (velocity and altitude changes) such that all conflicts in the airspace are avoided; a conflict being the loss of the minimum safety distance that has to be kept between two aircrafts. A mixed 0-1 linear optimization model based on geometric transformations for collision avoidance between an arbitrary number of aircrafts in the airspace is developed. Knowing initial coordinates, angle direction and level flight, the new configuration for each aircraft is established by minimizing several objectives like velocity variation and total number of changes (velocity and altitude), and forcing to return to the original flight configuration when no aircrafts are in conflict. Due to the small computational time for the execution, the new configuration approach can be used in real time by using optimization software.