Brochures

Annual Reports

SimLabs Technical Papers

Real-Time Simulation Documentation

Douglas N. Sweet
Presenter
Seagull Technology, Inc.

Vikram Manikonda
Intelligent Automation, Inc.

Jesse S. Aronson
Science Applications International Corporation

Karlin Roth
NASA Ames Research Center

Matthew Blake
NASA Ames Research Center

This paper describes the approach for creating a prototype modeling and simulation system that captures the interactions between key participants within the National Airspace System. The current operational paradigm for the National Airspace System has nearly reached its limits and cannot accommodate the projected increases in air travel demand. As a result, systems-engineering practices are being used to develop and evaluate candidate operational concepts for air traffic control. As these new concepts are considered, it is imperative that adequate and credible models are available to: 1) perform conceptual trade evaluations covering many issues and metrics; 2) provide detailed evaluations from many viewpoints of
changes to the system prior to their implementation; and 3) conduct real-time and non-real-time analyses of system-wide performance. It is planned that an effective modeling and simulation capability, known as the Airspace Concept Evaluation System, will be achieved by improvements to existing models, as well as development of extensive new modeling capabilities. The initial effort concentrates on the development and validation of a toolbox of compatible models that can be configured to address many different concepts and evaluation criteria. This modeling strategy is supported by the emergence of distributed simulation capabilities together with the availability of a suite of models that represent key components of the air traffic system that can be integrated into a gate-to-gate modeling tool. In particular, the Airspace Concept Evaluation System prototype utilizes the High-Level Architecture together with agent-based software to create the large-scale, distributed simulation framework necessary to support system-wide evaluations. The complete simulation system will contain the run-time simulation engine together with scenario generation utilities, databases and post processing tools. The prototype that is presented in this paper focuses on development of the
run-time simulation engine.

Download the full paper in PDF (1.0 Mb).

A hardcopy of this document is available by request from Kathleen Starmer.