Evolutionary air traffic flow management for large 3D-problems

We present an evolutionary tool to solve free-route Air Traffic Flow Management problems within a three-dimensional air space. This is the first evolutionary tool which solves free-route planning problems involving a few hundred aircraft. We observe that the importance of the recombination operator increases as we scale to larger problem instances. The evolutionary algorithm is based on a variant of the elitist recombinationalgorithm. We show a theoretical analysis of the problem, and present the results of experiments.