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Hierarchical multiagent reinforcement learning schemes for air traffic management

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Abstract

In this work we investigate the use of hierarchical multiagent reinforcement learning methods for the computation of policies to resolve congestion problems in the air traffic management domain. To address cases where the demand of airspace use exceeds capacity, we consider agents representing flights, who need to decide on ground delays at the pre-tactical stage of operations, towards executing their trajectories while adhering to airspace capacity constraints. Hierarchical reinforcement learning manages to handle real-world problems with high complexity, by partitioning the task into hierarchies of states and/or actions. This provides an efficient way of exploring the state–action space and constructing an advantageous decision-making mechanism. We first establish a general framework of hierarchical multiagent reinforcement learning, and then, we further formulate four alternative schemes of abstractions, on states, actions, or both. To quantitatively assess the quality of solutions of the proposed approaches and show the potential of the hierarchical methods in resolving the demand–capacity balance problem, we provide experimental results on real-world evaluation cases, where we measure the average delay per flight and the number of flights with delays.

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Notes

  1. http://www.eurocontrol.int/articles/air-traffic-flow-and-capacity-management.

  2. The mapping of joint states to abstract joint states is straightforward using \(\phi _L\), given that each joint state is a concatenation of local state parameters.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by the National Matching Funds 2017-2018 of the Greek Government and more specifically by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology (GSRT), related to DART(www.dart-research.eu) project. The major part of this work has been completed during the DART project where authors participated as members of the University of Piraeus Research Center group. We would like also to acknowledge the contribution of CRIDA for providing the data during the DART project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece

    Christos Spatharis & Konstantinos Blekas

  2. Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece

    Alevizos Bastas, Theocharis Kravaris & George A. Vouros

  3. CRIDA, Madrid, Spain

    Jose Manuel Cordero

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  1. Christos Spatharis
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  2. Alevizos Bastas
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  3. Theocharis Kravaris
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  4. Konstantinos Blekas
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  5. George A. Vouros
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Correspondence to George A. Vouros.

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Spatharis, C., Bastas, A., Kravaris, T. et al. Hierarchical multiagent reinforcement learning schemes for air traffic management. Neural Comput & Applic 35, 147–159 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-021-05748-7

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