Strategic deconfliction of aircraft trajectories

In this work, we present a methodology to minimize the number of potential conflicts between aircraft trajectories based on route-slot allocation techniques. The traffic assignment problem is modeled as a combinatorial optimization problem for which two metaheuristic optimization algorithms are developed and implemented. The first algorithm relies on a standard simulated annealing, while the second algorithm uses a hybrid-metaheuristic method. The proposed algorithms were implemented and tested on real air-traffic data for which an optimal solution for every trajectory is obtained within affordable computation time.