A critical bisimulation approach to safety criticality analysis of large-scale Air Traffic Management systems

Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems are joint cognitive systems where a relevant number of technical systems and human agents interact with each other. In this paper we propose an approach to the complexity reduction in the analysis of safety critical situations arising in the evolution of ATM systems. We introduce the notion of arena of agents as an abstract description of large-scale complex systems and in particular of ATM systems. We then introduce the notion of critical bisimulation as a tool for complexity reduction. The proposed framework is applied to the analysis of safety criticalities of the Terminal Manoeuvring Area T1 operation, an ATM procedure selected as a benchmark to capture key features arising in the novel SESAR 2020 concept of operation.