I’ve always been interested in ways of visualizing complex systems. Simply displaying a fairly literal graphical representation of a bunch of state variables seems unsatisfactory. The correlations and causal relationships are rarely apparent; on the other hand our pattern-seeking brains are all too likely to see relationships where none exist. I remember attending a conference on agent technology (specifically “social” software agents) in which a speaker said that her team was looking for ways to “construct a narrative” that corresponded to what was going on in the system. That feels about right.
But anyway… when I want to visualize a really complex system, I head over to Passur’s site for BOS, pick a good time of day (18:00 works well), and click Start Replay. (The reason to watch a replay is because then you can click on individual aircraft to display their information. That feature is disabled for the live feed, ostensibly for reasons of security. There’s also a random delay on the live feed.)
At the 10 mile setting you can watch the way the air traffic controllers set up the streams of aircraft for arrivals. (At that setting my house is in the lower left corner, below the “J” of Jamaica Pond.) Zooming out to 90 miles you get a nice sense of how the large-scale airways system feeds into the arrival streams. And each one of those icons represents an autonomous agent, with one or two independent planning subsystems, and less than perfect communications, interpreting the wishes of a bunch of ground-based planning systems….
(Passur’s Airport Monitor is available for a number of airports. You don’t have to watch BOS. But if you too have a soft spot for Logan, check out this article from Salon.)
[By the way, the applet doesn’t work quite right on the Mac. Not sure why….]