Adaptive Traffic-Following Scheme for Orderly Distributed Control of Multi-Vehicle Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive control scheme for autonomous multi-vehicle systems that dynamically balances traffic-following and direct paths, improving efficiency and scalability in airspace management.

Contribution

It proposes a novel adaptive traffic-following scheme that allows aircraft to independently adjust their behavior based on current airspace conditions, enhancing system performance.

Findings

Lower aircraft travel times with dynamic traffic-following behavior

Minimal increase in disorder within the airspace

Benefits depend on temporal and spatial horizons

Abstract

We present an adaptive control scheme to enable the emergence of order within distributed, autonomous multi-agent systems. Past studies showed that under high-density conditions, order generated from traffic-following behavior reduces travel times, while under low densities, choosing direct paths is more beneficial. In this paper, we leveraged those findings to allow aircraft to independently and dynamically adjust their degree of traffic-following behavior based on the current state of the airspace. This enables aircraft to follow other traffic only when beneficial. Quantitative analyses revealed that dynamic traffic-following behavior results in lower aircraft travel times at the cost of minimal levels of additional disorder to the airspace. The sensitivity of these benefits to temporal and spatial horizons was also investigated. Overall, this work highlights the benefits, and potential necessity, of incorporating self-organizing behavior in making distributed, autonomous multi-agent systems scalable.