Development and Validation of a New Tool for Performance Evaluation of ADS-B Based Vehicle Management Systems in real Airports

This work is aimed at the presentation of a new tool to evaluate the performance of Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) Mode S systems in real airport environments which has been developed by a research project consortium, composed by public and private organizations. The ADS-B is the next generation technology for the future surveillance scenario. Using this system it has been possible to implement further services on the existing surveillance technology such as the Traffic Collision Avoidance system (TCAS , on the airport surface, the multilateration systems. On this scenario there is an increasing demand for implementing an ADS-B based surface vehicle management system that would allow aircraft equipped with cockpit displays to see if there is a vehicle on the runway or the movement area, thus improving the overall safety of the airport movements. This strategy is also addressed by Eurocontrol inside its ATM strategy for the years 2000-2020. In order to extensively use the ADS-B Mode S to monitor the vehicles on the airport surface in real environments the aeronautical authorities should be sure that this new system has no impact on the overall performance of the air traffic surveillance. The simulator has been developed in response to this need and will also allow to optimize antennas distribution to allow full coverage of the area of interest. In this paper we will provide the general architecture of the ADS-B 1090 MHz channel simulator and a detailed description of the specific models and procedures used. Moreover the simulation results to validate the tool will be shown considering real traffic and radar distributions available in one or more airport environments.