ACES terminal model enhancement

Abstract

Terminal Model Enhancement is an advanced modeling capability for simulating terminal area airport and airspace traffic operations. But, more importantly, TME is a platform for testing advanced air traffic management concepts using plug-and-play modeling. TME augments the existing airport surface and terminal airspace modeling capabilities of NASA's Airspace Concept Evaluation System, an agent-based fast-time National Airspace System simulation. TME supports detailed analysis of concepts addressing future surface and terminal airspace operations. TME models 4-dimension trajectories and provides a system of pluggable components upon which replacement components can be developed to model alternative operational concepts. TME Airport ATC and TFM agents generate surface route plans, move aircraft through a vertexedge graph, implementing pilot self-separation and controller conflict resolution, gridlock avoidance and gate utilization models. TME TRACON ATC, TFM and Flight agents apply advanced sequencing and spacing modeling to determine conflict-resolved airspace route plans, assign landing times and use 4D trajectory modeling to fly aircraft along route plans. TME introduces a unique runway operations model that integrates TRACON landing management with Airport ATC takeoff and runway taxi crossing management. TME re-architects the Flight, Airport and TRACON ATC and TFM agents to provide new plug-and-play modeling capabilities using advanced planning and control logic. The 4D trajectory modeling simulates surface and terminal airspace movement, determining the flight position, altitude, 3.A.3-2

Validation of Simulations of Airport Surface Traffic with the Surface Operations Simulator and Scheduler

“…In Ref. 16 the pushback procedure duration averaged 202 seconds with a 189 second standard deviation. Moreover, there were outlier flights with pushback durations as little as 77 seconds and as large as 7 minutes.…”

“…Validation is the process of measuring the differences between simulation and reality. 16 If the differences are too large, the benefits predicted by the simulation lack credibility. Typically, when the differences are large a simulation is tuned.…”

Evaluating Surface Optimization Techniques Using a Fast-time Airport Surface Simulation

“…A new flexible fast-time airport surface simulation platform known as Terminal Model Enhancement (TME) was used to evaluate the surface optimization techniques. TME is an enhancement to the NASA Airspace Concept Evaluation System (ACES) simulation software and provides a high-fidelity simulation of traffic movement and traffic management in the terminal airspace and airport surface domains 7 . TME is an appropriate platform for evaluating the surface optimization techniques because it provides advanced airport-airspace modeling functionality based on 4-dimension (4D) trajectories and supports detailed analysis of concepts addressing future surface and terminal airspace operations.…”

“…As illustrated in Figure 4 above, the Route Planner is a service used by the Traffic Controller to select routes for all flights in the system. The Route Planner can generate surface route plans for all flights active in or scheduled to be active in a user-configurable Airport ATC Planning Window 7 . The Route Planner can also access the flight repository and get detailed flight information, including gate pushback time, aircraft type, airline, etc.…”

Development of Fast-Time Stochastic Airport Ground and Runway Simulation Model and Its Traffic Analysis

“…However, this paper focuses on a stochastic model, which should also be appropriate to run a simulation fast enough. Most existing simulation models account for detailed aircraft movement but are also deterministic and slow, thus not suitable for the purpose of this paper [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Although some airport models consider uncertainty effect, such as the variance of taxiing speed or the take-off separation [14,15], there are few researches considering uncertainties.…”