Dynamic traffic management systems with coordinated ATMS and ATIS will require the integration of many important technologies. These technologies include traffic surveillance, congestion prediction, incident detection, and traffic flow control. The control functions associated with these technologies impose a system architecture that is distributed and hierarchical and each level in the hierarchy can be viewed as a "node" in a communications network. All nodes in the system are "decision" nodes and each node consists of a surveillance module, a state estimation module and a control module. The surveillance data used and the states estimated by each module varies with the level of the node on the hierarchy. Such hierarchical structures improve the management and flow of large amounts of data, provide for fault tolerance, build in system modularity and reduce communications requirements over long distances.