Our modern economy and lifestyle not only is enabled by air transportation, but also demands that air transportation maintain a large annual growth. Growing air transportation, however, will not be easy. Some countries are facing gridlock and require substantial improvements in capacity, while others need to implement their first-ever comprehensive air traffic management system and ensure that it is compatible with world-wide travel. In addition, military systems need to be integrated, and spaceflight operations as well as uninhabited air vehicles will need to interact seamlessly with daily operations. Air transportation systems also need to address considerable safety and security issues. Therefore, redesigning air transportation may be the largest engineering challenge of this century - not only is it global in scope, but it requires levels of safety and efficiency that demand careful design, analysis and certification. Simulation is a vital part at all stages of this process. This special issue is the second of two focusing on simulation in air transportation, the first being published in SIMULATION, Vol. 80, No. 1, in 2004. For both special issues we sought a range of papers as diverse as the applications of simulation in air transportation. These simulations may focus on one or a few humans in human-in-the-loop experiments, or may span regions, nations or economies. A simulation may analyze the operational efficiency of a new air traffic management procedure or facility as measured by aircraft throughput, or it may estimate economic demand for air travel, or it may estimate the safety of operations currently in place or only imagined. The method of simulation might use classic formulations such as discrete-events, or new models of system dynamics such dynamic event trees and dynamically-colored petri nets, or new paradigms for viewing system behaviors such as the evolutionary and emergent representations inherent to agent-based simulation. Each has its part in the analysis and design of air transportation.
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