Congestion and Operational Efficiency Simulation for Modern Airspace in Florida Using Agent-Based Modeling

The rapid growth of commercial aviation, frequent space launch activities, and emerging Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) operations are significantly increasing the complexity and congestion of airspace management. Florida’s airspace, characterized by major airports, extensive general aviation activity, and frequent space launches from Cape Canaveral, creates unique challenges in efficiently managing dynamic traffic flows. This paper presents a novel data-driven approach using agent-based modeling (ABM) to simulate dynamic aircraft interactions under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) to generate airspace capacity congestion mapping in Florida. The ABM framework incorporates dynamic routing, temporary flight restrictions, and traffic separation characteristics, providing a technique to quantify operational performance using a Monte Carlo simulation. The airspace congestion risk assessment indicated that the saturation risk as 1.1% during normal operation, and the risk increases to 32.5% during space launch operation. The 3D congestion visualization aims to identify the sector congestion hot spot to find resolutions for future operations.