Towards a distributed situation management capability for SESAR and NextGen

This paper is concerned with the design of a distributed aviation security situation management capability in SESAR and NextGen. This research-in-progress report presents an approach to distributed situation management based on the concepts of network-centric operations and agent-based modeling. In particular, One of the key issues in aviation security is that despite their catastrophic magnitude, incidents are rare and their precursors hard to identify. The anticipated growth of aviation will increase this challenge as the amount of air traffic will double by 2025, and the future ATM System will see a higher integration of manned and unmanned air vehicles with significantly different capabilities to interact with on-board situations. We envision a highly integrated air transportation system and the capability to process relevant situational information elements. The described situation management problem is modeled as a multi-agent information problem. Situation management is viewed as an emergent property of collaborative systems including both human operators and technological agents. This paper addresses the challenges and conceptual modelling of an agent based simulation of the future aviation and air traffic management environment. The results obtained indicate that automated support for situation management in aviation security is feasible and capable of supporting distributed information sharing and early identification of incidents. Also of importance is that this capability will not place additional constraints on the future ATM System as it can be designed as a data service of the envisaged system-wide information management infrastructure.