Issues and opportunities for agent-based modeling in air transportation

Characterizing the envelope of most probable future air transportation architectures requires a system-of-systems approach. Such an approach is intended to produce both tactical and strategic level decisions and do so in consideration of technological, policy, and socio-economic aspects. Agent-based modeling has found productive use in this domain by providing flexible tool for analysis of large-scale interacting systems. Following from the system-of-systems nature of air transportation, existing models can be readily categorized by their level of abstraction. Four existing agent-based models and one model under development are reviewed in this paper, identifying and generalizing four major methodological issues in their application of ABM. Subsequently, implications from these applications on augmentations such as game theory, agent-based optimization, intelligent agents, and treatment of uncertainty are presented. All these issues exist even beyond the scope of air transportation and could be of value for common application of ABM.