Dealing with complexity in air traffic flow management

The paper presents a methodological approach in the area of complex system studies. It provides a description of a model aimed at protecting air traffic sectors against overload in a large-scale air traffic system. In such a problem, different aspects must be taken into account : data uncertainty, complexity due to the large dimension of the air traffic system, structural and functional interactions, etc. The model proposed is a decentralised and co-ordinated system composed of a co-ordination level and a control level. The study points on the co-ordination level which decomposes the large sector network into several smaller overlapping subnetworks that can be controlled independently using a fuzzy interaction prediction method.