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. Unfortunately, an externally imposed control is often not internalized by employees and has a short-term effect on their performance. To achieve a long-term effect, employees need to be internally motivated to adhere to regulations. Theories from social sciences propose that team processes play an important role in the dynamics of individual motivation. In this paper an agent-based model is proposed, by which the impact of social interaction and coordination in teams of platform employees on their individual motivation and compliance with safety regulations at an airline ground service organization are explored. The model was simulated and partially validated by a case study performed at a real airline ground service organization. The model was able to reproduce behavioral patterns of compliance of the platform employees in this study.Control & OperationsAerospace Engineerin

Formal specification and analysis of take-off procedure using VDM-SL

traffic management system is a complex adaptive and safety critical system which requires considerable attention for its modelling and verification. Currently Air traffic control (ATC) systems are heavily dependent upon human intervention at airport causing accidents and delays because of failure of communication. The purpose of this study is to develop, plan, manage and verify aircrafts movement procedures at the airport surface that prevent delays and collisions. The airport surface is decomposed into blocks and represented by the graph relation. The state space of the system is described by identifying all the possible components of the system. The ground and local controls monitor queues of the aircrafts moving from taxiway to take-off. It is insured that once an aircraft is inserted into a queue, it is eventually removed from it after the next queue has become available. The take-off procedure is provided using graph theory and Vienna Development Method Specification Language (VDM-SL) and analyzed using VDM-SL toolbox. Formal specification of graph-based model, taxiways, aircrafts, runways and controllers is provided in static part of the model. The state space analysis describing take-off algorithms is provided by defining optimal paths and possible operations in dynamic model expediting the departure procedure. The model is developed by a series of refinements following the stepwise development approach. The delays at airport surface require effective safety and guidance protocols to control air traffic at the airport. In static model, the safety criteria are described in terms of invariants over the data types carrying critical information. The safety is insured by defining pre/post conditions in description of operations for changing state space of the system. Although the proposed study is focussed more on the safety component, however, the efficiency is not ignored. Document type: Articl