Can shared scheduling prevent UAM collisions?
Separation Assurance in Urban Air Mobility Systems using Shared Scheduling Protocols
January 16, 2025
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08933This paper explores using shared scheduling protocols, similar to those in networking and operating systems, to manage air traffic, specifically for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) systems. Aircraft are treated as independent agents, and intersections of flight paths are treated as bottlenecks/critical resources. The goal is to prevent collisions by coordinating aircraft access to these intersections using decentralized decision-making.
Key points for LLM-based multi-agent systems:
- Decentralized Coordination: The proposed methods, CSMA/CD and SRTF, allow agents (aircraft) to make decisions based on local observations, without a central controller, much like agents in a distributed web application might interact.
- Resource Management: The concept of bottlenecks/critical resources directly translates to resource contention problems in web applications where multiple agents need to access shared databases, APIs, or other resources.
- Conflict Resolution: The shared scheduling protocols demonstrate strategies for resolving conflicts among autonomous agents, useful for scenarios where LLMs act as agents within a larger system.
- Safety and Performance Tradeoffs: The paper highlights the inherent trade-off between ensuring safety (no collisions) and performance (flight times), a consideration relevant when designing multi-agent web applications with competing objectives.
- Non-Compliant Agents: The research also examines the impact of agents that don't follow the established protocol, valuable for understanding robustness in open, dynamic web environments where some LLM agents might not strictly adhere to the intended behavior.