How algorythmes optimise Air Traffic Management

Three ENAC OPTIM Team researchers – Dynamical systems Optimization – published « Metaheuristic in air traffic management ». Discover the authors interview and the power of algorythmes to optimize Air Traffic and make it safer.

Interview of Nicolas Durand, David Gianazza et Jean-Baptiste Gotteland, the three ENAC authors of « Metaheuristics for Air Traffic Management ».

What are metaheuristics about ?

A metaheuristic is an optimization algorithm meant to deal with difficult problems for which classical optimization methods are ineffective or cannot be used. It is generally a stochastic iterative algorithm progressing hopefully toward a global optimum, but with no guarantee to reach it. Metaheuristics can deal with various problems for which the objective function can be the result of a simulation.

How can it be applied to Air Traffic Management?

Air traffic management faces many optimization problems and in all phases of flight. Airspace design, long term traffic flow management, short term take-off slot allocation, aircraft taxiing at big airports, and en route conflict detection and resolution are all big problems involving many uncertainty parameters that are hard to model with simple formulas. These problems are often efficiently solved with Metaheuristics.

What are the contributions of the book?

This book summarizes 20 years of research on air traffic management optimisation. It describes the state of the field and introduces many application examples using real traffic data. We propose models capable of taking into account many uncertainties related to air traffic. This book thus offers an original and pragmatic approach.