An Empirically grounded Agent Based simulator for the Air Traffic Management in the SESAR scenario

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source agent-based simulator for air traffic management in the SESAR scenario, enabling policy testing and analysis of different routing strategies and their impact on traffic complexity and controller workload.

Contribution

It provides a novel, empirically grounded simulation model that captures strategic and tactical air traffic management, including free-routing procedures, with validation against human controller behavior.

Findings

Free-routing reduces controller operations but increases conflict complexity.

Most traffic complexity metrics decrease with free-routing, except those related to flight level changes.

The simulator's complexity handling aligns with human controller behavior in non-free-routing scenarios.

Abstract

In this paper we present a simulator allowing to perform policy experiments relative to the air traffic management. Different SESAR solutions can be implemented in the model to see the reaction of the different stakeholders as well as other relevant metrics (delays, safety, etc). The model describes both the strategic phase associated to the planning of the flight trajectories and the tactical modifications occurring in the en-route phase. An implementation of the model is available as open-source and freely accessible by any user. More specifically, different procedures related to business trajectories and free-routing are tested and we illustrate the capabilities of the model on airspace implementing these concepts. After performing numerical simulations with the model, we show that in a free-routing scenario the controllers perform less operations although they are dispersed over a larger portion of the airspace. This can potentially increase the complexity of conflict detection and resolution for controllers. In order to investigate this specific aspect, we consider some metrics used to measure traffic complexity. We first show that in non-free-routing situations our simulator deals with complexity in a way similar to what humans would do. This allows us to be confident that the results of our numerical simulations relative to the free-routing can reasonably forecast how human controllers would behave in this new situation. Specifically, our numerical simulations show that most of the complexity metrics decrease with free-routing, while the few metrics which increase are all linked to the flight level changes. This is a non-trivial result since intuitively the complexity should increase with free-routing because of problematic geometries and more dispersed conflicts over the airspace.