Decentralization in Air Transportation

In this work,we demonstrate that decentralized control can result in stable, efficient, and robust operations in the Air Transportation System. We implement decentralized control for aircraft taxiing operations and use Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation to analyze the resulting system behavior Decentralized controllers at each intersection of the airport taxiway system autonomously guide aircraft through the system. They achieve conflict-free operations with a minimum amount of information, coordinate their actions to improve system performance, and can dynamically accommodate disruptions such as runway configuration changes.