Formal modeling of a complex adaptive air traffic control system

Abstract

Air traffic control system studied in this paper is a complex adaptive socio-technical system that controls the traffic of all aircrafts in the airport's radar range. The complexity of this system arises due to the number of elements and factors intervene in it such as aircrafts, controllers, runways, taxiways, weather, etc. This complexity makes the system unpredictable which require a real time management and adaptation of a dynamic state. The dynamic state means that during system building we cannot know which aircrafts will enter the airport neither their arrival nor departure time. All these facts makes developing air traffic control system a significant and challenging task in the context of air traffic management. We describe this complex adaptive socio-technical system using a model based on a complex network. This kind of complex network is often represented using a graph where nodes represent aircrafts (agents) and edges represent the exchange of data over the network. In a complex network we define strategies describing the behaviour of aircrafts in all situations. These strategies should be carefully defined to maintain the stability of the system and avoid any mistake that could leat to a disaster. This high risk can be avoided by using sophisticated techniques such as formal methods during system design. Formal methods are mathematically based techniques for specifying and verifying systems. Use of those methods can greatly increase our understanding of a system by revealing inconsistencies, ambiguities, and incompleteness that might otherwise go

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