Dynamic Graph Algorithms for Smart Air-Traffic Management

Faculty : Radhakant Padhi  (AE)  L. Sunil Chandran (CSA)

Summary:

Rapid growth in the air-traffic is slowly becoming quite overwhelming for the existing Air Traffic Control (ATC) system to handle. Appropriate safety measures need to be taken to maintain adequate separation between them at all point of time while maximizing the air traffic volume in the available airspace at all time. Since different aircrafts fly at different speeds, and also cannot hover for buying time for decision making, the problem is substantially complex. This problem is also aggravated in the vicinity of the airports located in metro cities where the traffic density is high. Since manual monitoring and guiding of all aircrafts 24/7 in real-time is impossible, optimal, intelligent and predictive decision-making technology needs to be developed to automate the process as much as possible and manage the air-traffic in a smart way.

The airborne flying aircrafts constitute a time-varying dynamic graph, and hence dynamic graph theoretic algorithms can be exploited for this purpose to solve a variety of challenging problems such as to ensure avoidance of collision/conflicts at all time, sequencing of aircrafts for landing etc. This is the objective of this project.