Modeling of Air Traffic Flow Using Cellular Automata

Fast simulation technology is very important to explore the consequences of air traffic management decision. Although a variety of simulation tools have been developed to make decisions for air traffic controllers, the cognitive process of air traffic controllers is not effectively integrated into these tools. This article studies a probabilistic cellular automata (CA) model for air traffic flow simulation. By introducing the safety distance parameter into the CA model, the equilibrium property of air traffic system is studiedusing the statistical physics method. The simulation results show that the data are in good agreement with the measured results.