A New Ontology-Based Multi-Agent System Model for Air Traffic Management

Problems such as flights sequences, flights emergency positions, hijacking, airport controlled space management, and Free Flight are problems that the Air Traffic Management (ATM) are faced with it. Managing a large volume of flights data and their correct interpretation plays a key role in the prevention of air accidents, human errors, and flight interactions. The agent-based systems and ontology are tools that together have attributes such as autonomy, learning, and cooperation to solve ATM’s problems. This research proposed a new ontology-based multi-agent system for air traffic management. The design of air agents has been done on the architectural basis of BDI. This model contains five main modules that were designed under Multi-agent Software Engineering (MaSE) methodology in AgentTool tools. Methontology methodology was exploited for the engineering of the ontology of agents and the implementation process was carried out using the Protégé software. The hybrid model ATM ontology-based multi-agent system (ATM-onto-mas) has been implemented with Java Agent Development Framework (JADE). The actual flight data of Mashhad Airport, Iran used to evaluate and test this model. Terminal control area (TMA) of Mashhad Airport was designed and simulated in an ATCsim simulator based on real data. The obtained results of the ATM-onto-mas system in a simulated environment indicate improvement in the evaluated parameters Compared with other methods.