Agentfly: NAS-wide simulation framework integrating algorithms for automated collision avoidance

Abstract

AgentFly is a software prototype providing a distributed architecture for large-scale NAS-wide simulation implemented as a multi-agent system. AgentFly is implemented on top of the Aglobe [1] platform which is both an implementation framework and a runtime engine for custom agents. It was selected over possible alternatives (e.g. JADE [2]) for its outstanding performance and scalability supporting seamless interaction among heterogeneous software, hardware and human actors. AgentFly system has been developed for over five years. It was initially built f or simulation-based validation and comparison of various approaches for autonomous collision avoidance algorithms adopting the free-flight concept. Later, AgentFly has been extended with high-level control algorithms providing tactical control — i.e. coordination of several autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The same agents and algorithms integrated in AgentFly simulation are also deployed on real UAV platforms. Besides this UAV-related application, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) supports the application of the AgentFly system for simulation and evaluation of the future civilian air-traffic management system. AgentFly has been extended with high-fidelity computational models of civilian airplanes and a parallelization concept integrating dynamic load-balancing. The parallelized approach of AgentFly has been validated in simulation using data of a full civilian air-traffic touching NAS. Nowadays, AgentFly is being extended so that it provides a simulation of ATC functions for the NEXTGEN concept validation. There are being integrated ATC & NAS automation agents which are used to simulate human operation in ATM.