A comprehensive study of agent-based airport terminal operations using surrogate modeling and simulation

Airport terminals are complex sociotechnical systems, in which humans interact with diverse technical systems. A natural way to represent them is through agent-based modeling. However, this method has two drawbacks: it entails a heavy computational burden and the emergent properties are often difficult to analyze. The purpose of our research...

Using Causal Discovery to Design Agent-based Models

Designing agent-based models is a difficult task. Some guidelines exist to aid modelers in designing their models, but they generally do not include specific details on how the behavior of agents can be defined. This paper therefore proposes the AbCDe methodology, which uses causal discovery algorithms to specify agent behavior. The methodology...

Systemic agent-based modeling and analysis of passenger discretionary activities in airport terminals

Discretionary activities such as retail, food, and beverages generate a significant amount of non-aeronautical revenue within the aviation industry. However, they are rarely taken into account in computational airport terminal models. Since discretionary activities affect passenger flow and global airport terminal performance, discretionary...

An agent-based empirical game theory approach for airport security patrols

Airports are attractive targets for terrorists, as they are designed to accommodate and process large amounts of people, resulting in a high concentration of potential victims. A popular method to mitigate the risk of terrorist attacks is through security patrols, but resources are often limited. Game theory is commonly used as a methodology...

Agent-based vulnerability assessment at airport security checkpoints: A case study on security operator behavior

Despite enormous investments in airport security, terrorists have been able to find and exploit vulnerabilities at security checkpoints. Existing vulnerability assessment methodologies struggle with accounting for human behavior, and agent-based modelling forms a promising technique to overcome this limitation. This paper investigated how the...

AbSRiM: An Agent-Based Security Risk Management Approach for Airport Operations

Security risk management is essential for ensuring effective airport operations. This article introduces AbSRiM, a novel agent-based modeling and simulation approach to perform security risk management for airport operations that uses formal sociotechnical models that include temporal and spatial aspects. The approach contains four main steps:...

Agent-based modelling and analysis of security and efficiency in airport terminals

Both security and efficiency are important performance areas of air transport systems. Several methods have been proposed to assess security risks and estimate efficiency independently, but only few of these methods identify relationships between security risks and efficiency performance indicators. To analyze security, efficiency, and the...

Analyzing airport security checkpoint performance using cognitive agent models

Modern airports operate under high demands and pressures, and strive to satisfy many diverse, interrelated, sometimes conflicting performance goals. Airport performance areas, such as security, safety, and efficiency are usually studied separately from each other. However, operational decisions made by airport managers often impact several...

Formal and computational modeling of anticipation mechanisms of resilience in the complex sociotechnical air transport system

With ever-growing numbers of passengers and complexity of the air transport system, it becomes more and more of a challenge to manage the system in an effective, safe, and resilient manner. This is especially evident when disruptions occur. Understanding and improving resilience of the air transport system and its adaptive capacity to...

Modeling safety culture as a socially emergent phenomenon: A case study in aircraft maintenance

Safety culture is often understood as encompassing organizational members’ shared attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and values associated with safety. Safety culture theory development is fraught with inconsistencies and superficiality of measurement methods, because the dynamic and political nature of culture is often ignored. Traditionally,...

An Agent-based Model to Study Compliance with Safety Regulations at an Airline Ground Service Organization

According to aviation statistics, most of the safety occurrences<br/>happen not in the air, but on the ground. Management of airlines and airports<br/>often consider failures to comply with safety-related regulations as important<br/>contributors to safety occurrences. To address the issue of compliance,<br/>approaches based on external...

An agent-based model to study effects of team processes on compliance with safety regulations at an airline ground service organization

Maintaining high levels of safety under conditions of ever increasing air traffic is a challenging task. Failures to comply with safety-related regulations are often considered to be important contributors to safety occurrences. To address the issue of compliance, approaches based on external regulation of the employees’ behavior were proposed....