Starting in 1992 (well before the term "free flight" had even been coined) Source Code System's employees have been pursuing advanced air traffic management concepts. A paper written by our president, "A Self-Organizational Approach forResoling Air Traffic Conflicts" was published in the November 1994 issue of the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory Journal and presented to the fall 1993 ORSA-TIMS conference.

The abstract reads:

The use of airways and navigational fixes to form fixed routes in the sky is central to modern-day air traffic control (ATC). Fixed routes, however, limit efficiency and airspace capacity in comparison to paths that are not constrained or predefined. This articled describes a computational technique for determining collision-free time/space paths for multiple vehicles without the use of fixed routes. The technique applies a simple destination-seeking rule and a few conflict-avoidance algorithms to each vehicle individually such that the collective solution is determined by the calculated behavior of the individual vehicles; that is, the overall solutions are self-organizational in nature. This self-organizational approach has been tested in a variety of scenarios ranging from simple two-dimensional conflicts to the modeling of an ATC sector handling an unrealistically high traffic load. The simulations, implemented on a very modest computer workstation, have proved the self-organizational approach capable of finding solutions to complex traffic conflicts at rates faster than real time. Furthermore, the self-organizational solutions tend to require smaller speed/direction deviations than solutions obtained with human reasoning.

If you would like to receive a copy of the paper, please contact us or download the .pdf file here.

Source Code Systems is an active member of RTCA and has worked (and continues to work) with Rockwell Collins and the RTCA SubGroup1 Airborne Conflict Management committee on further development of the techniques described in the 994 paper. Papers covering this research, "Free Flight Separation Assurance Using Distributed Algorithms", and co-authored with Wallace Kelly of Rockwell Collins, was presented at the 1999 IEEE Aerospace Conference and 2000 IEEE Aerospace Conferences.