A New Prioritization Method for Conflict Detection and Resolution in Air Traffic Management

The current air traffic management systems are not able to manage the enormous capacities of air traffic perfectly and have not sufficient capability to service different types of flights. Free flight is a new concept presented potentially to solve problems in the current air traffic management system. The free flight concept changes the current centralized and command-control airspace system (between air traffic controllers and pilots) to a distributed system that allows pilots choose their own flight paths more efficiently, and also plan for their flight with high performance themselves. Despite of many advantages of free flight (such as less fuel consumption, minimum delays and the reduction of the workload of the air traffic control centers), it cause many problems such as conflicts (collisions) between different aircrafts. In this paper, we presented a model for conflict detection and resolution between aircrafts in air traffic management using graph coloring problem’s concept. In fact, we mapped the congestion area to a corresponding graph, and then addressed to find a reliable and optimal coloring for this graph using a prioritization method.