A Compositional Hybrid System Approach to the Analysis of Air Traffic Management Systems

In Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems catastrophic events may be caused by error propagation in a multiagent procedure [SBdP03]. The inherent complexity of these systems typically involving many agents makes their analysis prohibitive today. We approach the analysis of multi–agent ATM systems using compositional hybrid systems techniques. Hybrid systems formalism is shown to capture the dynamics of each agent acting in ATM systems in normal and abnormal operative conditions. The interaction of different agents is formalized by means of an appropriate notion of composition of hybrid systems that captures the information exchange among the agents involved. A formal analysis of the obtained composed hybrid system is intractable in realistic ATM scenarios. We provide results that substantially reduce the computational effort required in this analysis, and that allow us to manage ATM scenarios characterized by an arbitrary large number of agents. The ASAS Lateral Crossing Procedure is analyzed to illustrate the benefits of the proposed methodology in the analysis of ATM systems.