  Increasing traffic demands, higher levels of automation, and communication
enhancements provide novel design opportunities for future air traffic
controllers (ATCs). This article presents a novel deep reinforcement learning
(DRL) controller to aid conflict resolution for autonomous free flight.
Although DRL has achieved important advancements in this field, the existing
works pay little attention to the explainability and safety issues related to
DRL controllers, particularly the safety under adversarial attacks. To address
those two issues, we design a fully explainable DRL framework wherein we: 1)
decompose the coupled Q value learning model into a safety-awareness and
efficiency (reach the target) one; and 2) use information from surrounding
intruders as inputs, eliminating the needs of central controllers. In our
simulated experiments, we show that by decoupling the safety-awareness and
efficiency, we can exceed performance on free flight control tasks while
dramatically improving explainability on practical. In addition, the safety Q
learning module provides rich information about the safety situation of
environments. To study the safety under adversarial attacks, we additionally
propose an adversarial attack strategy that can impose both safety-oriented and
efficiency-oriented attacks. The adversarial aims to minimize safety/efficiency
by only attacking the agent at a few time steps. In the experiments, our attack
strategy increases as many collisions as the uniform attack (i.e., attacking at
every time step) by only attacking the agent four times less often, which
provide insights into the capabilities and restrictions of the DRL in future
ATC designs. The source code is publicly available at
https://github.com/WLeiiiii/Gym-ATC-Attack-Project.
