EVALUATION OF A COOPERATIVE AIR TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT MODEL USING PRINCIPLED NEGOTIATION BETWEEN INTELLIGENT AGENTS

Air Traffic Management decisions affect the interests of a diverse group of organizations and individuals. Agents, including individual aircraft, airlines, and ground control centers, look for conflictfree options that meet their own interests without depreciating other agents' operations. A cooperative structure for interactions of agents has been defined on the basis of Principled Negotiation. This method allows distributed decision-making for all users while providing a fair coordination through Air Traffic Management systems. The major interest of Principled Negotiation relies in its mutual gain approach to selection of options. Agents negotiate options with a traffic coordinator that ensures coordination of all users preferred operations while satisfying safety criteria. Thus, the model is flexible in responding to the needs and goals of agents, and it maintains safety. It provides users with different interests the freedom to optimize their operations, it includes Air Traffic Flow Management processes, and it certifies safe aircraft separations. A computer simulation dedicated to evaluating the benefits of such a cooperative structure is under development. The simulation provides trajectorybased traffic modeling with freedom of routing, communication, and negotiation modeling. It incorporates intelligent behavior modeling and incorporates airborne collision avoidance systems. First results show that Principled Negotiation is appropriate for coordination in a multi-agent/multi-interest system such as the Aircraft/Airspace System.