Process and Software Tools for Generating Airport Models to Support Surface Operation Analyses

Abstract

In NASA’s NextGen-Airspace Project, the System Level Design, Analysis, and Simulation Tools (SLDAST) Research Focus Area (RFA) has responsibility for developing system-level analysis and simulation tools that can be used to assess concepts and technologies developed by RFAs across several NASA projects. The most prominent assessment product from SLDAST is the Airspace Concept Evaluation System (ACES), which provides simulation capabilities over the whole NAS with details down to airport surface traffic. Among the options in ACES for airport modeling, the most detailed one involves a link/node queuing model which represents the complete layout of the airport surface including all runways, taxiways, ramp area, and gates. This link/node surface model is adequate for assessing various options of surface operations, including trajectory-based operations, an important capability considered for the NextGen transformation. Due to the amount of details, the generation of a link/node surface model for each airport is quite involved. It requires modeling the airport surface layout by geo-registering all important locations on the surface such as gates and runway/taxiway intersections, and connecting the nodes into a network to include all the taxiways, runways, and taxi paths within the ramp area. The resulting link/node data are eventually used in defining a queuing network for simulating the surface operations. As a large number of such models will be required to support simulation of the nation-wide traffic, a modeling process has been developed for generating the model data to ease the effort in developing these surface models. In addition to generating the complex link/node data, the process needs to specify procedures for gate assignment and route planning. A suite of software tools, known as SurfTools, has been developed to support the modeling process by automating the generation of the necessary data files required by the simulation. This paper provides a high-level description of the modeling process, and describes the design and implementation of SurfTools. A companion paper describes in more detail the modeling process, the model data requirements, and how the models are used to support surface-operation simulations.