Decentralized airspace concepts have been proposed to increase the capacity of airspace. Previous research has showed that decentralized airspace concepts show great improvements in capacity, such as the Layers concept, where height rules are implemented, and unstructured airspace, where there are no procedural constraints. One aspect that determines capacity is safety. Measuring the number of instantaneous conflicts can be used as an intrinsic safety metric for new airspace design. Conflict counts can be measured by doing experiments which can be time consuming, or by using mathematical models. However, these models are derived using certain assumptions about the traffic. The ideal traffic settings for the models may not always be realistic in practice. This research attempts to improve the models and validate how accurate the models are with varying traffic scenarios, so that the conflict count models may be used for more realistic traffic scenarios.

Currently, Air Traffic Control is responsible for the separation of air traffic in our limited airspace. To facilitate the continuing growth of air traffic, an ambitious plan is to give the responsibility of the separation task to the pilots of the aircraft. The behavior of existing conflict resolution methods within this decentralized approach is not completely understood in multi-aircraft conflict scenarios. This research proposes the usage of the Solution Space Diagram, constructed from velocity obstacles, as an automated, horizontal conflict resolution method. With the aid of fast-time simulations, the performance in terms of safety, stability and efficiency of the method using the Solution Space Diagram proved to be worse than an existing method due to coordination issues and the diagram being filled up rapidly under high aircraft densities.