Strategies to mitigate tight spatial bounds between conflicts in dense traffic situations

The constant and rapid increment of air traffic demand is pushing current air traffic control systems to their limits. One of the factors that can contribute to extend current air space capacity, is the development of automatic decision support systems to assist tactical aircraft conflict detection and resolution. However, the combinatorial nature of the problem poses several challenges for such a task. We define an aerial ecosystem as the set of en route aircraft that can be affected by a conflict resolution. In dense traffic there can be situations were conflicts coexist in time with tight spatial bounds. Such conflicts form what we call compound aerial ecosystems. We investigate several strategies to decompose such ecosystems, in order to treat each conflict separately and reduce complexity. These strategies prove to be successful in the majority of the encountered cases.