The air transportation network affects yearly over 700 millions of passengers in the ECAC (European Civil Aviation Conference) area, with flight delays causing yearly costs - both direct and indirect, such as missed business opportunities - amounting to billions of euros.
We have developed an agent-based model to study the propagation of reactionary delays (ie. delays which are transferred from one flight to another) over the EU airport network, in which the basic agents are the aircraft and airports, and air traffic is simulated using aircraft schedules, passenger connectivity patterns and airport capacities obtained from real data.
This approach has already been followed for both the US and European airport networks, but large scale simulations of at least several months of European air traffic, validated through comparison with empirical data, have not been attempted yet. The reason for this lies in the difficulty of obtaining high quality, reliable data for the ECAC area, and in the additional complexity of the European system, which also will be addressed during this talk.