A causal model to analye aircraft collision avoidance deadlock scenarios

Continuous increase in the traffic density over the certain en-route sectors provokes many situations in which a loss of separation minima (SM) between two aircraft occurs. Although, this loss is predicted well in advance, giving a proper look-ahead time (LAT) for a detection function, the resolution of such an event may lead to a new conflict situation due to dynamics of surrounding traffic aircraft. A multiagent system framework can deal with these cases. This work presents three different complexity indicators that can be used to shape the social behavior of the agents. Simulation results show that the proposed indicators can suggest drastically different nature of the same ecosystem, therefore further investigation of the correlation of the proposed indicators to the actual complexity is necessary.