Among the class of complex and safety critical industries, air traffic is an interesting
example that poses exceptional challenges to advanced design. By its very nature,
each aircraft has its own crew, and each crew is communicating with several human
operators in different air traffic management (ATM) and airline operational control
(AOC) centres on the ground in order to timely receive instructions critical to a safe
flight. In addition, from an organisational perspective, air traffic involves
interactions between many stake holders: pilots, air traffic controllers, airline
operation centres, airport authorities, government regulators and the public
travelling. Figure 1 highlights this characteristic feature of interplay between
distributed decision making and safety criticality both for air traffic and for other
complex or safety-critical industries, such as finance and nuclear and chemical
plants. Among the safety critical industries, air traffic stands out regarding the many
distributed levels of interactions in control and decision making