You won't hear that phrase, but I mean the theoretical study of air traffic. For instance, I studied "free flight", which is when airplanes can fly directly from their takeoff airport to their landing airport and manage their own collision-avoidance, and showed that in certain free-flight situations you can increase the throughput of the airspace by reducing the information that you give to pilots.

It's an interesting general phenomenon: They try to optimize their route using all of their information. So the more information they have, the more unpredictable their behavior is. More information can actually cause more trouble than it solves in some cases, at least when it's information about what other agents are doing.

I had a contract from NASA to look for chaotic behavior in en-route air traffic, but my conclusion was that it is unlikely and nothing need be done to avoid it at present.