  Air Traffic Control (ATC) is a complex safety critical environment. A tower
controller would be making many decisions in real-time to sequence aircraft.
While some optimization tools exist to help the controller in some airports,
even in these situations, the real sequence of the aircraft adopted by the
controller is significantly different from the one proposed by the optimization
algorithm. This is due to the very dynamic nature of the environment. The
objective of this paper is to test the hypothesis that one can learn from the
sequence adopted by the controller some strategies that can act as heuristics
in decision support tools for aircraft sequencing. This aim is tested in this
paper by attempting to learn sequences generated from a well-known sequencing
method that is being used in the real world. The approach relies on a genetic
algorithm (GA) to learn these sequences using a society Probabilistic
Finite-state Machines (PFSMs). Each PFSM learns a different sub-space; thus,
decomposing the learning problem into a group of agents that need to work
together to learn the overall problem. Three sequence metrics (Levenshtein,
Hamming and Position distances) are compared as the fitness functions in GA. As
the results suggest, it is possible to learn the behavior of the
algorithm/heuristic that generated the original sequence from very limited
information.
