A light-propagation model for aircraft trajectory planning

Abstract : The need for increasing air-traffic capacity motivates planning air- craft trajectories in 4D (space+time). In order to generate sets of conflict-free 4D trajectories, we introduce a new natural-paradigm al- gorithm: the light propagation algorithm (LPA). This algorithm is a wavefront propagation method that yields natural solutions for the path planning problem, specifically in the case of air-traffic congestion. Indeed, LPA yields very encouraging results on real-world day of traffic over France while satisfying the specific constraints of air-traffic management.