Comparing Route Selection Strategies in Collaborative Traffic Flow Management

In the United States, air traffic flow management (TFM) is concerned with directing traffic through the national airspace system (NAS), such that unsafe conditions are avoided. Unlike airport tower and en-route controllers, who focus on aircraft operating in their immediate airspace and deal directly with pilots, TFM focuses on balancing overall traffic demand with airport and airspace capacity. NASA´s Next Generation Air Transportation System (NGATS) project seeks to address these issues in several ways; our aim is to explore and test their new concept of operations for collaborative traffic flow management (CTFM) through a multi-agent simulation.