Spatio-temporal conflict detection and resolution

We report on a method that uses spatio-temporal reasoning to schedule aircraft to take-off positions. The objective is to aid human controllers to detect potential conflicts which could cause hazards or delays. The challenge is to develop temporal-spatial reasoning systems that can handle complex and dynamic situations so that their results help the controllers to instruct the aircraft to move smoothly until they take off. Optimisation is secondary and sometimes not easy to measure. Although the proposed method was developed with the aircraft domain in mind, it could be applied to order the movements of interacting objects that have both expected paths and destination times (i.e., "achieve this goal, at this place, at this time").