Decentralized autonomous traffic management through corridor networks
Air taxis and autonomous aircraft are expected to fly in the skies above major cities in the coming years; far more aircraft than today’s air traffic controllers can handle directly. Researchers in DINaMo demonstrate how autonomous aircraft can safely coordinate with each other on their own, using only what they can see of nearby traffic, even in complex airspace with dozens of aircraft flying through it at once.
Authors: Jasmine Jerry Aloor, Aadarsh Govada, and Hamsa Balakrishnan
Citation: Second US-Europe Air Transportation Research and Development Symposium (ATRDS2026), June 16 2026
Abstract:
As autonomous aircraft are introduced at scale and traffic density increases, centralized management becomes insufficient to coordinate the large numbers of crewed and uncrewed aircraft. DedicatedAdvanced Air Mobility (AAM) corridors have therefore been proposed for organizing high-density autonomous traffic flows. The desire to scalably provide autonomous aircraft flexibility in trajectory planning motivates the development of decentralized approaches to traffic management in AAM corridors.
In this work, we extend a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to address the challenge of decentralized traffic flow management in air corridor networks. We test policies trained in a single-corridor setting on increasingly complex multi-corridor networks with combinations of mergers and splits in a zero-shot manner. Experimental results demonstrate that learned behaviors transfer well to scenarios with varying traffic density, network geometry, and heterogeneous vehicle performance,without needing centralized coordination or model retraining. We evaluate system-level performance in terms of conformance to corridor boundaries, completion rates, average speeds, distance traveled,and maintenance of inter-aircraft separation. We find that although our policies require only locally coordinated entry, traversal, and exit behaviors, they collectively produce desirable traffic flows through the corridor network.
