ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explains his 35-year experience in aeronautical engineering, and in large programs such as NextGen in the United States and Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) in Europe. He focuses on SESAR, whose definition phase started in 2005 to "define, develop and deploy what is needed to increase Air Traffic Management (ATM) performance and build Europe's intelligent air transport system". Air Traffic Control (ATC) shifted to ATM to solve airspace saturation problems. Symptoms of ATM complexity are congested airspace, unpredictable delays, and lower productivity. Air traffic complexity constantly increases because the number of flights increases. Consequently, single-agent control is leading to multiagent management. ATM organizational complexity is linked to social cognition, agent-network complexity, and more generally multiagent management issues. ATM of the future will be almost entirely based on highly interconnected cyber-physical systems (CPS). New kinds of risks will emerge from the activity of the giant airspace CPS-based infrastructure.
