FACES: A Free Flight Autonomous and Coordinated Embarked Solver

FACES is an autonomous and coordinated embarked (on board) conflict solver for Free Flight airspace. It solves conflict by computing simple manoeuvres that guarantees conflict free trajectories for the next 5 minutes (min). Coordination is ensured by giving sequential manoeuvres to aircraft with a token allocation strategy. FACES can be implemented with the current positioning, broadcasting and flight management technology. More-over, it is robust to communication or system failure for time up to one or two minutes. FACES was tested with a traffic simulator on busy traffic days over France. Airspace over level 320 was considered as Free Flight. 638 out of 641 conflicts were solved without using vertical manoeuvres. The 3 remaining conflicts could easily be solved with vertical manoeuvres. The mean delay was less than 30 seconds by aircraft manoeuvred, with a maximum delay of 150 seconds. An airborne implementation of this algorithm can be seriously considered.