AN APPROACH TO SEMI-AUTOMATED OPTIMAL SCHEDULING AND HOLDING STRATEGIES FOR AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL

Abstract : The paper considers the problem of coordinating the traffic flow and holding patterns of N aircraft which desire to land in a single runway. A distance separation is to be enforced over the outer marker. It is shown that this problem can be attacked as a variation of a linear-quadratic optimal control problem. The solution of this optimization problem can be used to indicate which aricraft can accomplish headway corrections by velocity control, and which require to undergo path stretching or holding maneuvers. The gradual implementation of these strategies in current and evolutionary ATC systems will also be discussed. (Author)