Eulerian models are used to represent the air traffic environment as traffic flows between interconnected control volumes representing the airspace system. While these models can be manually derived for simple air traffic patterns, computer-based approaches are essential for modeling realistic airspaces involving multiple traffic streams. A computeraided methodology for deriving large-dimensional Eulerian models of air traffic flow is described here. Starting from the specification of a few airspace parameters, and traffic data, the modeling technique can automatically construct Eulerian models of the airspace. The synthesis of air traffic flow control algorithms using the model predictive control technique in conjunction with these models is given. It is shown that the flow control logic synthesis can be cast as a linear programming problem. The flow control methodology is illustrated using air traffic data over two regions in U.S. airspace.

The state dependent Riccati equation (SDRE) technique is a recently developed methodology for designing control laws and estimation algorithms for missile flight control. Although its potential is well recognized by control theory experts, the industry acceptance of the technique has been slow. The main reasons for this are: a) unlike linear control technology, the SDRE approach requires advanced numerical methods for its implementation, which are not currently available off-the-shelf, b) the perception that this technique may not be computationally feasible for real-time implementation on flight control processors.Both of these issues are addressed in this paper. A software package for real-time implementation of the SDRE technique was developed during the present research. The execution of this software at speeds up to 2 kHz sample rates on problems of the size commonly encountered in missile flight control applications was then demonstrated on commercial off-theshelf processors.

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