Rule-based guidance for flight vehicle flocking

Abstract Within nature, mobile organisms often exhibit a form of emergent behaviour known as flocking. Flocking is adaptive because, for a given population density, the information processing required for collision avoidance is minimized. Within human activities, the problem of increasing civil air traffic is leading to consideration of decentralized traffic management methodologies, such as free flight. On the other hand, for military flight vehicles, safe operation of flight vehicles at high air space densities is seen as an opportunity. The present paper considers the use of guidance based on flocking rules to support the management of flight vehicles in situations of high airspace density. Three elemental flocking schemes are identified based on guidance tasks and a simple analytical framework is developed that allows insight into the fundamental flocking behaviour for all three schemes. Flight vehicles are modelled as point masses moving with constant speed in the horizontal plane. A non-dimensional approach is used throughout to provide generality. The proposed flocking algorithm is implemented within Matlab and numerical simulation results are used to validate analytical predictions of steady state flock size and entropy. Results show that a simple parameter based on the ratio of rule weights is sufficient to predict flock behaviour.