Modelling of potential hazards in agent-based safety risk analysis

One of the key steps in safety risk assessment of an Air Traffic Management (ATM) operation is to identify as many potential hazards as is possible. All these potential hazards have to be analysed upon their possible contribution to safety risk of the operation considered. In an agent-based safety risk assessment of ATM operations there are two approaches towards the assessment of the safety risk impacts of hazards. The direct way is to incorporate the hazard in the agent-based model, and to assess this agent-based model on safety risk by conducting Monte Carlo simulations. The alternative is to avoid the modelling of a potential hazard in the agent-based model, and instead assess the impact of the hazard on safety risk through sensitivity analysis and bias and uncertainty assessment. Because agent-based modelling and simulation of hazards might reveal emergent behaviour that remains invisible through sensitivity analysis, there is a need to understand how to model various hazard types in an agent-based model. In order to comply with this need, this paper identifies 38 model constructs that are able to capture more than 97% of the potential ATM related hazards in an agent-based model. The paper also shows that four of the five main model constructs are related to four widely used modelling domains in aviation, i.e. system reliability, human performance simulation, human reliability analysis, and aircraft trajectory simulation. However, the model construct that captures the highest percentage of hazards (41%) is related to the more recent domain of multi-agent systems modelling. KeywordsAgent-based modelling; Safety; Human performance; Hazards; Multi-agent dynamic risk modelling