Hierarchical information architecture for air traffic management

The air traffic management (ATM) concept extends the historical air traffic control (ATC) function to new levels of coordination and space-time scale. The development of new ATM applications in the United States´ National Airspace System (NAS), and parallel efforts internationally, require formalized and automated coordination between multiple control partitions and levels in the ATM hierarchy. It is proposed that the uncertainty and congestion inherent in the airspace have informational analogs in the ATM system that should be treated by adaptive and hierarchical control paradigms. These paradigms incorporate ideas of informational dynamics and economics. The ATM architecture sketched here derives from development efforts for an experimental NAS application called Advanced Automated En Route ATC (AERA)