Distributed Air‐Traffic Control. II: Explorations in Test Bed

Abstract

This is the second of two companion papers dealing with distributed planning for air‐traffic control. Three different organizational structures have been implemented: the local centralized architecture, and location‐centered cooperative planning system with one‐ and two‐level coordinator‐coworker hierarchies. We present an initial, simplified analysis of the speedup obtainable by using the latter two organizational structures. The vehicle of our empirical studies, the distributed air‐traffic control test bed is then introduced. We discuss the design and the results of a series of experiments performed. We compare in the test‐bed performance measures of the three systems using the respective organizational structures. The comparisons are made at different levels of traffic density and problem size, in terms of communication overhead and processing time needed for planning.