Air Traffic Flow Modeling, Analysis and Control

Abstract

Development of a methodology for mathematical modeling and analysis of air traffic flow is presented. The modeling approach describes the air traffic environment in terms of traffic counts in user-defined elements of the airspace system, and traffic flows between these elements. The resulting Eulerian model of air traffic allows dynamic analysis and flow-control system design using well-established control theoretic approaches. The primary advantage of the Eulerian approach is that the dimension of the air traffic flow model depends only on the number of defined elements in the traffic network, and remains invariant with respect to the number of aircraft in the airspace system. Analytical development, computational implementation, and traffic flow modeling and control of a regional airspace are discussed in the paper.