In aviation industry, free flight is a new concept which implies considering more freedom in the selection and modification of flight paths during flight time. The free flight concept allows pilots choose their own flight paths more efficient, and also plan for their flight with high performance.
Although free flight has many advantages such as minimum
delays and the reduction of the workload of the air traffic
control centers, this concept causes many problems which
one of the most important of them are conflicts between different aircrafts. Thus, Conflict Detection and Resolution
(CD&R) is a major challenge in air traffic management.
In this paper, we presented a model for CD&R between aircrafts in air traffic management using Graph Coloring Problem (GCP) method. In fact, we mapped the congestion area
to a corresponding graph, and then addressed to find a reliable and optimal coloring for this graph using one of the new
evolutionary algorithms known as Imperialist Competitive
Algorithm (ICA) to solve the conflicts. Using ICA for solving GCP is a new method.