Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation of Coordination by Airline Operations Control

This paper implements and compares four coordination policies through agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS), motivated by the need to understand and further optimize coordination processes in the highly complex socio-technical air transportation system. Three policies are based on established practices, whereas a fourth is based on the joint activity coordination theory from the psychology research domain. For each of these four policies, the relation with the literature on coordination is identified. The specific application of the four policies concerns airline operations control (AOC), which core's functionality is one of coordination and taking corrective actions in response to a large variety of airline operational disruptions. In order to evaluate the four policies, an agent-based model of the AOC and crew processes has been developed. Subsequently, this agent-based model is used to assess the effects of the four AOC policies on a challenging airline disruption scenario. For the specific scenario considered, the joint-activity coordination-based AOC policy outperforms the other three policies. More importantly, the simulation results provide novel insight in the operational effects of each of the four AOC policies, which demonstrate that the ABMS allows to analyze the effectiveness of different coordination policies in the complex socio-technical air transportation system.