ELSA Air Traffic Simulator: an Empirically grounded Agent Based Model for the SESAR scenario

This paper describes the Air Traffic Simulator produced by the ELSA project. It is partially based on interacting agents taking actions during strategic and tactical phases: air companies, network manager, pilots, and controllers. The simulator is highly modular and each part can be used independently of the others. The code is open source, ready to use and available for the research community. Some results concerning the future organization of the European Airspace (free-routing) are presented, using the full capabilities of the model. We found that the implementation of free-routing could have a positive impact on the safety event occurrences that will be reduced in number although spread over a larger area. The controllers behaviour will therefore move to a situation where they have to perform a smaller number of operations dispersed over a larger portion of the airspace. We also show that the number of operations performed by a controller quadratically depends from the number of aircraft present in the considered airspace and that such quadratic scaling law is modified when the airspace is partitioned in air traffic sectors with capacity constraints.