Conflict resolution problems for air traffic management systems solved with mixed integer programming

We are pleased to introduce this collection of papers covering different aspects of intelligent transportation systems. These papers were selected from a list of papers presented at the Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference and Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, jointly held in Detroit, MI, October 3–5, 2000. In order to bear witness and celebrate the large success of these two scientific meetings, that for the first time were held in the same year and same place, the two Program Chairs, Prof. Petros A. Ioannou and Prof. Alberto Broggi, in collaboration with the Editor of the Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Chelsea White III, considered the publication of a special issue that would include a number of selected papers that were presented at these conferences. Profs. Alberto Broggi, Petros A. Ioannou, and Shoichi Washino agreed to serve as Guest Editors of this special issue. The first two Guest Editors made the initial selection of six papers from each conference based on the area and rating of the paper during the conference review process. The third Guest Editor handled the papers that were posing a conflict of interest, or were outside the area of expertise of the other Guest Editors. The authors of the selected papers were asked to revise their papers and submit them for the special issue. The Guest Editors sent out the submitted papers for review by following the usual procedure of the journal. Based on the reviews, the Guest Editors made their final recommendation. The papers with positive reviews that required minor revisions were accepted for the special issue without having to go through another round of reviews. The rest were either rejected or recommended for extended revisions and resubmission to the journal as regular submissions. The five accepted papers covered topics from three different areas of transportation that includes air, surface, and marine and are described as follows. 1) “Conflict Resolution Problems for Air Traffic Management Systems Solved with Mixed Integer Programming” by Lucia Pallottino, Eric Feron, and Antonio Bicchi. This paper is selected based on good reviews and also for covering a topic in air transportation, an important area that has begun to attract more attention in research. With the air space getting more congested the number of conflicts and near misses is increasing. This paper proposes two different formulations of the multiaircraft conflict avoidance problem using mixed-integer linear programming so that standard optimization software tools could be used to resolve conflicts and manage air traffic. 2) “Quintic G -splines for the Iterative Steering of Vision-based Autonomous Vehicles” by Aurelio