A Multi-Agent Simulation of Collaborative Air Traffic Flow Management A Multi-Agent Simulation of Collaborative Air Traffic Flow Management

Today’s air traffic management system is not expected to scale to the projected increase in traffic over the next two decades. Enhancing collaboration between the controllers and the users of the airspace could lessen the impact of the resulting air traffic flow problems. We summarize a new concept that has been proposed for collaborative air traffic flow management, the problems it is meant to address, and our approach to evaluating the concept. We present our initial simulation design and experimental results, using several simple route selection strategies and traffic flow management approaches. Though our model is still in an early stage of development, these results have revealed interesting properties of the proposed concept that will guide our continued development, refinement of the model, and possibly influence other studies of traffic management elsewhere. Finally, we conclude with the challenges of validating the proposed concept through simulation and future work.