Multi-Agent Simulation of En-Route Human Air-Traffic Controller

The Next-Generation Transportation program coordinates the evolution and transformation of the current air-traffic management (ATM) system for the National Airspace System (NAS). Currently the NAS has a limited capacity and cannot handle the increasing future air traffic demands. However, before newly proposed ATM concepts are deployed they must be rigorously evaluated under realistic conditions. This paper presents AGENTFLY, an emerging NAS-wide highfidelity multi-agent ATM simulator with precise emulation of the human controller operation workload model and human-system interaction. The simulator is validated using a flight scenario developed by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that is based on real data. We present preliminary results focusing on the accuracy of the simulated controllers within AGENTFLY.

[1]  John M. Carroll,et al.  Making Use: Scenario-Based Design of Human-Computer Interactions , 2000 .

[2]  Michael S. Nolan,et al.  Fundamentals of Air Traffic Control , 1990 .

[3]  David K. Chin,et al.  Using airspace simulation to assess environmental improvements from free flight and CNS/ATM enhancements , 1999, WSC '99.

[4]  A. Borshchev,et al.  From System Dynamics and Discrete Event to Practical Agent Based Modeling : Reasons , Techniques , Tools , 2004 .

[5]  John M. Roche,et al.  Software metrics and measurement principles , 1994, SOEN.

[6]  David M. Nicol,et al.  Discrete event fluid modeling of background TCP traffic , 2004, TOMC.

[7]  David Sislák,et al.  LARGE-SCALE HIGH-FIDELITY AGENT-BASED SIMULATION IN AIR TRAFFIC DOMAIN , 2011, Cybern. Syst..

[8]  V. A. M. Hunt,et al.  The Future of Air Traffic Control , 1961, The Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

[9]  Gerhard Weiss,et al.  Multiagent systems: a modern approach to distributed artificial intelligence , 1999 .

[10]  Kagan Tumer,et al.  Improving Air Traffic Management with a Learning Multiagent System , 2009, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[11]  Weibo Gong,et al.  Time-stepped simulation of queueing systems , 2001, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[12]  Sapna George,et al.  Build 8 of the Airspace Concept Evaluation System (ACES) , 2011, ICNS 2011.

[13]  Jacques Ferber,et al.  Multi-agent systems - an introduction to distributed artificial intelligence , 1999 .

[14]  J H McCracken,et al.  Analyses of Selected LHX Mission Functions: Implications for Operator Workload and System Automation Goals , 1984 .

[15]  Raja Parasuraman,et al.  Varieties of attention , 1984 .