An Agent-based Model to Study Compliance with Safety Regulations at an Airline Ground Service Organization

According to aviation statistics, most of the safety occurrenceshappen not in the air, but on the ground. Management of airlines and airportsoften consider failures to comply with safety-related regulations as importantcontributors to safety occurrences. To address the issue of compliance,approaches based on external regulation of the employees’ behavior wereproposed. Unfortunately, an externally imposed control is often not internalizedby employees and has a short-term effect on their performance. To achieve along-term effect, employees need to be internally motivated to adhere toregulations. To understand the role of motivation for compliance in groundservice organizations, in this paper a formal agent-based model is proposedbased on theories from social science with a wide empirical support. The modelincorporates cognitive, social, and organizational aspects. The model wassimulated and partially validated by a case study performed at a real airlineground service organization. The model was able to reproduce behavioralpatterns related to compliance of the platform employees in this study. Basedon the model, global sensitivity analysis was performed. The results of thisanalysis together with the simulation results were used to generaterecommendations to improve compliance.Aerospace Transport & Operation