The futures of the air transportation system: automated foresight scenarios generation and analysis

Abstract

The aviation sector needs to face multiple challenges, whether to mitigate its environmental impact, recover from the sanitary crisis, or satisfy its customers. This paper presents a foresight tool to help make decisions considering possible futures. It is designed to automatically and exhaustively generate all the possible futures of a system of agents, based on a formal model to define the system and its components along with the interactions between them. It is applied to the air transport system and the questions an airline company could ask itself. It aims to limit the impacts of past data and cognitive biases of participants with classic scenario production methods while using qualitative data. As principles of the agents of the system are considered, it adds a new perspective to make decisions and enables us to consider a notion of moral conflict. In fact, the analysis of generated scenarios shows that reaching a goal may require making a compromise between principles or defining priorities. It also shows that an agent, whatever decisions they can make, may face conflict situations because of other agents. The representations of the results allow a better understanding of the situation and analyses of the initial knowledge.