Multi-agent Planning and Coordination for Automated Aircraft Ground Handling
S. Chen (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
OA Sharpanskykh – Mentor (TU Delft - Air Transport & Operations)
Gulcin Ermis – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Air Transport & Operations)
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Abstract
Inspired by the vision of fully autonomous airside operations at Schiphol airport, this study aims to contribute to the short-term goal of automated aircraft ground handling. In this research, we design and evaluate a multi-agent system for planning of automated ground handling. There are two main components in the system, task allocation optimization, and multi-agent path planning. To allocate tasks to ground support equipment (GSE) vehicles, an auction mechanism inspired by temporal sequential single item (TeSSI) auction is proposed. Ground handling tasks scheduling for GSE vehicles is modeled as several single-vehicle pickup and delivery optimization problems (SPDP), and the values of the objective functions are applied to generate bids for GSE vehicle agents in the auction. Moreover, Prioritized Safe Interval Path Planning for large agents (LA-SIPP) is used to plan collision-free paths for GSE vehicle agents in the model to execute tasks. Experimental studies have shown that the system is able to perform task allocation and path planning of ground handling tasks for flights in 3 aircraft stands within a 4-hour time in a reasonable computational time. Moreover, the model is capable to replan the tasks for agents when disruption happens. Applying the lowest possible numbers of vehicles used in the current operation, the model can always reach success allocation and path planning rates higher than 81% and 98%, respectively.