Design of an air-air negotiation protocol to reorder aircraft arrivals sequence

Future air traffic is demanding innovative procedures and systems that take advance of new technologies capabilities. Especially significant are new procedures and systems for automating arrival air traffic operations in terminal areas. In this work, we present an air-air negotiation protocol to be used as a new component of the on board automation system for self-spacing flight operation for merging and in-trail separation in terminal area. Current works about such systems are centered on helping to the flight crew (FC) to maintain aircraft-aircraft in-trail separation. However it is necessary integrating in these systems new capabilities that allow decentralized flight procedures to achieve air-air agreements that provide local rearrangement of a predefined aircraft arrival sequence when operational circumstances makes it recommendable. The suggested air-air negotiation protocol can be considered as an extension of capabilities of the current aircraft separation assurance system (ASAS). It has been modeled under the agent-oriented programming paradigm and an ad-hoc multi-agent platform has been used for its implementation and preliminary evaluation.