Today’s air traffic management system is not expected to scale to the projected increase in traffic over the next two decades. Enhanced collaboration between the controllers and the users of the airspace is one of the new traffic flow management concepts being developed, and may substantially improve airspace utilization. We argue that an agent-based simulation is well suited to explore and validate these new concepts, and present our initial simulation design. We evaluate several simple route selection strategies and assignment policies that nonetheless show interesting properties of the proposed concept, and conclude with the challenges of validating the proposed concept through simulation and future work.
Shawn R. Wolfe, Francis Y. Enomoto, Peter A. Jarvi