Aircraft Conflict Resolution: A Benchmark Generator

Abstract

Aircraft conflict resolution is one of the major tasks of computer-aided air traffic management and represents a challenging optimization problem. Many models and methods have been proposed to assist trajectory regulation to avoid conflicts. However, the question of testing the different mathematical optimization approaches against each other is still open. Standard benchmarks include unrealistic scenarios in which all the flights move toward a common point or completely random generated instances. There is a lack of a common set of test instances that allows comparison of the available methods under a variety of heterogeneous and representative scenarios. We present a flight deconfliction benchmark generator that allows the user to choose between (i) different predefined scenario inspired by existing benchmarks in the literature; (ii) pseudo-random traffic meeting certain congestion measurements; (iii) and randomly generated traffic. The proposed setting can account for different levels of difficulty in the deconfliction of the aircraft and allows to explore and compare the real limitations of optimization approaches for aircraft conflict resolution. History: Accepted by Ted Ralphs, area editor for Software Tools. Funding: This work was supported by the H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions [Grant 764759 ITN “MINOA”]. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2022.1265 ) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2021.0283 ) at ( http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7377734 ).