Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation of Emergent Behaviour in Air Transportation

摘要

Commercial aviation is feasible thanks to a complex socio-technical system, which involves interactions between human operators, technical systems, and procedures at airlines, airports, air traffic service providers, and authorities. In view of the expected growth in commercial aviation, significant changes in this socio-technical system are in development both in the USA and Europe. Such changes may lead to changed and novel rare emergent behavior. In this paper, it is first illustrated that this complex socio-technical system generates various types of emergent behavior, ranging from simple emergence, through weak emergence, up to strong emergence. Then the paper demonstrates through a case study that agent-based modeling and simulation allows identifying changed and novel rare emergent behavior in this complex socio-technical system. The case study considered is an active runway crossing by a taxiing aircraft of a runway that is in use for departures. The MC simulation results obtained confirm that agent based modeling and simulation of a socio-technical air transportation system allows identifying rare emergent behavior that was not identified through earlier, non-agent-based simulations, including human-in-the-loop simulations of the same operation. A typical example of such emergent behavior is the finding that alerting systems do not really reduce the safety risk.