Hierarchical multiagent reinforcement learning schemes for air traffic management

In this work we investigate the use of hierarchical multiagent reinforcement learning methods for the computation of policies to resolve congestion problems in the air traffic management domain. To address cases where the demand of airspace use exceeds capacity, we consider agents representing flights, who need to decide on ground delays at the pre-tactical stage of operations, towards executing their trajectories while adhering to airspace capacity constraints. Hierarchical reinforcement learning manages to handle real-world problems with high complexity, by partitioning the task into hierarchies of states and/or actions. This provides an efficient way of exploring the state–action space and constructing an advantageous decision-making mechanism. We first establish a general framework of hierarchical multiagent reinforcement learning, and then, we further formulate four alternative schemes of abstractions, on states, actions, or both. To quantitatively assess the quality of solutions of the proposed approaches and show the potential of the hierarchical methods in resolving the demand–capacity balance problem, we provide experimental results on real-world evaluation cases, where we measure the average delay per flight and the number of flights with delays.