This study addresses the insufficiency of centralized management for high-density autonomous aircraft traffic by proposing a decentralized approach using multi-agent reinforcement learning. The researchers extend this MARL framework to manage traffic flow within complex air corridor networks featuring merges and splits. Policies trained in single-corridor settings are tested on increasingly complex multi-corridor scenarios in a zero-shot manner without retraining. Experimental results show that learned behaviors transfer effectively across varying traffic densities, network geometries, and heterogeneous vehicle performances. The evaluation measures system-level performance through conformance to boundaries, completion rates, average speeds, distance traveled, and inter-aircraft separation. Despite requiring only locally coordinated entry, traversal, and exit behaviors, the collective actions produce desirable traffic flows throughout the corridor network.
Decentralized Autonomous Traffic Management through Corridor Networks
from English