A Future Capabilities Agent for Tactical Air Traffic Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces Agent Mallard, a rules-based, forward-planning system for tactical air traffic control that integrates a stochastic digital twin to ensure safety and interpretability in conflict resolution.

Contribution

It presents a novel hierarchical, rules-based agent that combines expert strategies with stochastic simulation for safe, interpretable air traffic management.

Findings

Mallard's conflict resolution aligns with expert reasoning.

Preliminary tests show effective conflict resolution in simplified scenarios.

The architecture supports safety assessment and interpretability in future environments.

Abstract

Escalating air traffic demand is driving the adoption of automation to support air traffic controllers, but existing approaches face a trade-off between safety assurance and interpretability. Optimisation-based methods such as reinforcement learning offer strong performance but are difficult to verify and explain, while rules-based systems are transparent yet rarely check safety under uncertainty. This paper outlines Agent Mallard, a forward-planning, rules-based agent for tactical control in systemised airspace that embeds a stochastic digital twin directly into its conflict-resolution loop. Mallard operates on predefined GPS-guided routes, reducing continuous 4D vectoring to discrete choices over lanes and levels, and constructs hierarchical plans from an expert-informed library of deconfliction strategies. A depth-limited backtracking search uses causal attribution, topological plan splicing, and monotonic axis constraints to seek a complete safe plan for all aircraft, validating each candidate manoeuvre against uncertain execution scenarios (e.g., wind variation, pilot response, communication loss) before commitment. Preliminary walkthroughs with UK controllers and initial tests in the BluebirdDT airspace digital twin indicate that Mallard's behaviour aligns with expert reasoning and resolves conflicts in simplified scenarios. The architecture is intended to combine model-based safety assessment, interpretable decision logic, and tractable computational performance in future structured en-route environments.