Projects

This project, in collaboration with ENEA, the Italian Agency for Energy, Enviroment and New Technologies, explores the introduction of automatic tools for conflict resolution in a Free Flight environment. Free Flight, by delegating more freedom to pilots and advocating a less centralized control over aircraft, opens up a wide range of possibilities to make air traffic management safer, more scalable and more efficient. However, such improvements cannot be achieved without the introduction of sophisticated automatic tools to support the activity of pilots and controllers.

Collective Intelligence is an emergent, yet rigorous, computational framework which addresses problems in which several independent actors (or “agents”), while pursuing their own specific goals, collaborate to optimize some global efficiency measure. It aims at generating solutions for distributed systems which are dependable, robust and adaptive. Conflict resolution for a Free Flight environment stands out as an ideal domain of application for this approach which has reached technological maturity and has already proven effective in dealing with several real-world problem. In particular, we are applying a recent algorithm based on Multi-agents Systems and Game Theory, that allows individuals or groups to condition their own preferences on the preference of others, therefore enabling a truly collaborative approach to conflict resolution. By exchanging the information and goals of each aircraft, cooperation among aircrafts can be realized even in a completely distributed system.

The project aims at developing a software tool running this algorithm, which allows to simulate its behaviour in a 3D environment on test scenarios and on real air traffic patterns, provided by the Italian national agency for flight safety (ENAV). SMARC project is meant to be the starting point of a further enquiry that we are going to lead, in order to explore the actual impact of the introduction of such a technology in a realistic ATC environment.

Here in the following the demos of the developed 3D simulator, tested on various scenarios: