Analysis of the airspace design trade space

The objective of this paper is to propose a framework that allows the researchers to examine the trade-space inherent to airspace design. A number of factors preclude purely analytic methods. First, airspace systems are `open,´ i.e. their constituent components exit and enter the airspace outside of the control of the airspace; even if the aircraft entry and exit decisions are controlled, other constituent components such as weather hazards, cannot be controlled (and only imperfectly forecast). Additionally, the dynamics of such systems are hybrid in nature, including continuously-evolving dynamics, discrete dynamics, and detection and decisions generated at discrete points in time. Further, many aspects of airspace may be subject to emergence, i.e. behaviors observable at one level of abstraction (e.g. a higher-level abstraction of air traffic flows) that are created by dynamics understandable at a different level of abstraction (e.g. trajectories flown by individual aircraft). The methods demonstrated here rely on predicting the performance of airspace via large scale agent-based simulations to quantify their performance.