Improving air traffic management through agent suggestions

  • Authors:
  • Adrian Agogino;Kagan Tumer

  • Affiliations:
  • NASA Ames Research Center;Oregon State University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Providing intelligent automation to manage the continuously increasing flow of air traffic is critical to the safety and economic viability of air transportation systems. However, current automated solutions leave existing human controllers "out of the loop" rendering the potential solutions both technically dangerous (e.g., inability to react to suddenly developing conditions) and politically charged (e.g., role of air traffic controllers in a fully automated system). Instead, this paper proposes a distributed agent based solution where agents provide suggestions to human controllers. Results on traffic flow around New York show that the suggestion agents can improve system performance by up to 25% over that of human controllers alone, and that these results degrade gracefully when the number of human controllers that follow the agents' suggestions declines.