Locally generalised multi-agent reinforcement learning for demand and capacity balancing with customised neural networks

Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques are being studied to solve the Demand and Capacity Balancing (DCB) problems to fully exploit their computational performance. A locally generalised Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) for real-world DCB problems is proposed. The proposed method can deploy trained agents directly to unseen scenarios in a specific Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) region to quickly obtain a satisfactory solution. In this method, agents of all flights in a scenario form a multi-agent decision-making system based on partial observation. The trained agent with the customised neural network can be deployed directly on the corresponding flight, allowing it to solve the DCB problem jointly. A cooperation coefficient is introduced in the reward function, which is used to adjust the agent’s cooperation preference in a multi-agent system, thereby controlling the distribution of flight delay time allocation. A multi-iteration mechanism is designed for the DCB decision-making framework to deal with problems arising from non-stationarity in MARL and to ensure that all hotspots are eliminated. Experiments based on large-scale high-complexity real-world scenarios are conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the method. From a statistical point of view, it is proven that the proposed method is generalised within the scope of the flights and sectors of interest, and its optimisation performance outperforms the standard computer-assisted slot allocation and state-of-the-art RL-based DCB methods. The sensitivity analysis preliminarily reveals the effect of the cooperation coefficient on delay time allocation.