Air traffic control

An application for the simulation and automatic management of short-range air traffic control. It implements an AI to avoid collisions and to reduce delays.

Table of contents

• General info
• Advanced information
• Technologies
• Setup

General info

The airspace is W×H and is divided into sectors S₁,…,S_n containing A₁,…,A_m airports.

The application asks the user to enter the number n of sectors and m of airports, after which it generates the map (graph) of the airports (nodes) and routes (arcs) and divides the space into sectors in such a way that a sector contains a number of routes lower than R_max fixed parameter of the problem (for example 5). The map is generated automatically. The simulation starts (and proceeds) by randomly generating planes departing from an airport and heading towards a neighboring airport. The probability of an airplane spawning on a certain route in a certain time interval is regulated by a probability p (adjustable by the user) directly proportional to the length of the route. Each airplane has three attributes: the alphanumeric identifier, the altitude (in feet) and the speed (in km/h). For simplicity, the planes move at a constant speed and depart at an altitude of 33,000 feet and a speed of 700 km/h. When they arrive at their destination, they disappear from the map. The objective of the automatic air traffic manager is threefold:

• avoiding collisions in the air by maintaining a vertical distance of at least 1,000 feet between airplanes on the same or intersecting routes;
• avoid airspace congestion by respecting the maximum capacity limit of a sector equal to C_max airplanes (for example 5, which can be set before the simulation starts);
• reduce global delays or minimize the sum of the delays accumulated by the airplane with respect to the established route with initial speed.

Advanced information

For the sectorization it was decided to model the sectors using a quadtree. Monte Carlo method was used for traffic management along with a queue.

Technologies

Project is created with:

• QT 5.15.1
• CMake 3.4 or higher

Setup

Basic constants (like entity speed control, distance before collision etc.) can be changed in the config.h header file.

1. Clone this repo.
2. Make a build directory in the top level directory: mkdir build && cd build
3. Compile: cmake .. && make
4. Run it: ./(AirTrafficControl.