--We present an adaptive control scheme to enable the emergence of order within distributed, autonomous multi-agent systems. Past studies showed that under high-density conditions, order generated from traffic-following behavior reduces travel times, while under low densities, choosing direct paths is more beneficial. In this paper, we leveraged those findings to allow aircraft to independently and dynamically adjust their degree of traffic-following behavior based on the current state of the airspace. This enables aircraft to follow other traffic only when beneficial. Quantitative analyses revealed that dynamic traffic-following behavior results in lower aircraft travel times at the cost of minimal levels of additional disorder to the airspace. The sensitivity of these benefits to temporal and spatial horizons was also investigated. Overall, this work highlights the benefits, and potential necessity, of incorporating self-organizing behavior in making distributed, autonomous multi-agent systems scalable. Autonomous vehicle operations are expected to increase in the airspace over the coming decades. Initially, applications will include non-passenger operations, such as fire fighting or cargo delivery using uncrewed aerial vehicles of different sizes. Eventually, the scope will expand to passenger-carrying vehicles for urban or regional air mobility. These vehicles are expected to interact and integrate with other traffic within the same airspace. For scalability, this airspace of the future will be a collective system of autonomous vehicles, where each vehicle makes increasingly independent decisions.

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic emergence of traffic order in a distributed multi-agent system, aiming to minimize inefficiencies that stem from unnecessary structural impositions. We introduce a methodology for developing a dynamically-updating traffic pattern map of the airspace by leveraging information about the consistency and frequency of flow directions used by current as well as preceding traffic. Informed by this map, an agent can discern the degree to which it is advantageous to follow traffic by trading off utilities such as time and order. We show that for the traffic levels studied, for low degrees of traffic-following behavior, there is minimal penalty in terms of aircraft travel times while improving the overall orderliness of the airspace. On the other hand, heightened traffic-following behavior may result in increased aircraft travel times, while marginally reducing the overall entropy of the airspace. Ultimately, the methods and metrics presented in this paper can be used to optimally and dynamically adjust an agent's traffic-following behavior based on these trade-offs.