Tractable Real-Time Air Traffic Control Automation

A different paradigm is needed for real-time command and control (C&C) problems. Past approaches, using multiprocessors (MP), for real-time computing have had great difficulty in meeting real problem requirements. We review some reasons why C&C problems that require a solution on a MP architecture may be intractable, and then show an architecture where these reasons for intractability are nonexistent. We describe a polynomial time solution to the air traffic control (ATC) problem, which is a typical C&C problem. This solution uses a static, non-preemptive table driven schedule using a SIMD architecture called an associative processor (AP). The AP is an ideal processor for set and database operations since its single thread instruction stream can operate on an entire set of data with each instruction. The AP eliminates multi-thread instructions, which account for much of the MP intractability mentioned above. Keywords: Real-time processing, air traffic control, associative processors, multiprocessors 1