Multi-robot coordination techniques applied to air traffic control

Air Traffic Control (ATC) involves the collaborative work of air traffic controllers and pilots who resume together the responsibility of ensuring the safety and punctuality of all flights. The ever-increasing demand for commercial air travel poses great challenges to today's controller-centered ATC system, in which the controllers undertake the majority of the responsibility -- they command and the pilots follow the orders. The capacity of the airspace becomes easily saturated, particularly when aircraft bunching occurs and causes the risk of instant traffic overload. The essential need is therefore to better decentralize the system by redistributing the responsibility as well as workload. This paper presents our research to support this redistribution by setting up a methodological framework using multi-robot coordination techniques. The coherence and simplicity are their main qualities that we expect for the collaboration in ATC. In addition, recent promising research results on the capacity of several robots to react together against incidents can bring some flexibility to the ATC system that is inherently rigid.