The future management of air traffic allows aircraft choosing their own
velocities, altitudes and directions in real time. In aviation industry, this possibility
is known as “free flight”. One of the most important issues in the free flight method
is conflict detection and resolution problem. In successful free flight, conflicts while
maintaining satisfactory performance must be avoided. This paper, presents a multiagent based conflict detection and resolution approach for free flight. In this paper,
aircraft and ground flight path controllers are selected as agents, respectively called
Aircraft Agent or “AA” and Flight Path Controller Agent or “FPCA”. This type of
agent selection provides a proper balance between distributed and centralized
authority in order to solve air traffic conflicts and this is one of the advantages of
our proposed system. FPCA agents map the situation of traffic in their vision
domain to a flow graph using negotiation with aircraft agents. After some
conversion on mapped graph, agents color the corresponding graph using Particle
Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The proposed method is implemented and
tested by using five well-known test cases. The experimental results show the high
capability and efficiency of our approach for conflict problem. The advantages of
using our proposed system includes delay reduction, passenger comfort, safety and
speed increase, travel time reduction and less fuel consumption. This system not
only proposed for free flight but also can use along with the current air traffic
management systems without completely replaces them