The existing air transportation system is approaching a bottleneck because its dominant huband-spoke model results in a concentration of a large percentage of the air traffic at a few hubairports. Advanced technologies are greatly needed to enhance the transportation capabilities ofthe small airports in the U.S.A., and distribute the high volume of air traffic at the hub airports tothose small airports, which are mostly non-controlled airports. Currently, two major focus areasof research are being pursued to achieve this objective. One focus concentrates on thedevelopment of tools to improve operations in the current Air Traffic Management system. Amore long-term research effort focuses on the development of decentralized Air TrafficManagement techniques.This dissertation takes the latter approach and seeks to analyze the degree of decentralizationfor scheduling aircraft landings in the dynamic operational environment at single runway noncontrolledairports. Moreover, it explores the feasibility and capability of scheduling aircraftlandings within uninterrupted free-flight environment in which there is no existence of Air TrafficControl (ATC). First, it addresses the approach of developing static optimization algorithms forscheduling aircraft landings and, thus, analyzes the capability of automated aircraft landingscheduling at single runway non-controlled airports. Then, it provides detailed description of theimplementation of a distributed Air Traffic Management (ATM) system that achieves decentralized aircraft landing scheduling with acceptable performance whereas a solution to thedistributed coordination issues is presented. Finally real-time Monte Carlo flight simulations ofmulti-aircraft landing scenarios are conducted to evaluate the static and dynamic performance ofthe aircraft landing scheduling algorithms and operation concepts introduced.Results presented in the dissertation demonstrate that decentralized aircraft landing schedulingat single runway non-controlled airports can be achieved. It is shown from the flight simulationsthat reasonable performance of decentralized aircraft landing scheduling is achieved withsuccessful integration of publisher/subscriber communication scheme and aircraft landingscheduling model. The extension from the non-controlled airport application to controlled airportcase is expected with suitable amendment, where the reliance on centralized air trafficmanagement can be reduced gradually in favor of a decentralized management to provide moreairspace capacity, flight flexibility, and increase operation robustness.
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