Claire Tomlin, Graduate Student
Jana Kosecka, Postdoctoral Researcher
George J. Pappas, Graduate Student
(Professor S. Shankar Sastry)
Conflict resolution architecture for multi-agent hybrid systems with emphasis on Air Traffic Management Systems (ATMS) are developed. In such systems, conflicts arise in the form of potential collisions which are resolved locally by inter-agent coordination. This results in a decentralized architecture in which safety issues are resolved locally and central agencies, such as Air Traffic Controllers, focus on global issues such as efficiency and optimal throughput. In order to allow optimization of agents' objectives, inter-agent coordination is minimized by noncooperative conflict resolution methods based on game theory. If noncooperative methods are unsuccessful, then cooperative methods in the form of coordinated maneuvers are used to resolve conflicts. The merging of inter-agent coordination, which is modeled by discrete event systems, and agent dynamics, which are modeled by differential equations, results in hybrid systems.
A method for resolving noncooperative conflicts based on the potential field based motion planning is also investigated. Within this approach the distributed planner will encode both the goals of individual agents as well as strategies how to reach desired goals and avoid collisions between agents. The generated plans can be motivational for comming up with provably safe avoidance maneuvers for variety of situations.