Simulating Airport Operations in a Synthetic Environment

Current research on ATM (Air Traffic Management) is progressively focusing on the “green operations” concept. The European Commission as well as foreign institutions has identified Air Traffic as one of the sectors in which a “green” policy could be successfully implemented. Starting from the ACARE strategic research agenda, published in 2002, many EU funded projects have been launched aiming at a dramatic reduction of noise and pollution produced by Air Transportation System. Airport operations strongly affect the pollution and noise produced by an aircraft during the whole mission impacting on the environment and people living near airports. On the other hand, airport area and more generally the Terminal Aerodrome Zone is the bottleneck of Air Traffic System. The maximum capacity of Air Space is limited by the capacity of the airports. Therefore, the optimization of such operations is recognized as a challenge that aims at finding the best trade-off solution in order to maximize the airport capacity and minimize both pollution and noise. Modelling and simulation are the most powerful tools to study such an optimization problem. To help the evaluation of the model performances, a synthetic environment able to faithfully represent the airport area and its players (aircraft, helicopters, ground vehicles, etc.) is presented in this paper as an analysis tool. An experimental scenario that simulates Rome Fiumicino airport has been developed. In it aircraft are modelled as single material points and they are moved by an external simulation model implemented in Matlab/Simulink. The simulation model accepts as input variables the waypoints’ list to be visited by the aircraft and the aircraft speed. It gives as output the shortest path on the available taxi ways. The aircraft position at each time step is sent through an UDP protocol to the visualization environment and processed in order to obtain a fluent animation.