Time-parallel simulation of air traffic networks

Abstract

Air traffic management is widely studied in several different fields because of its complexity and criticality to a variety of stakeholders. However, the exploding amount of air traffic in recent years has created new challenges to ensure effective management of the airspace. A fast time simulation capability is essential to effectively explore the consequences of decisions of air traffic management. A new algorithm for simulating air traffic networks using a time-parallel simulation approach is proposed that distributes time segments of the simulation scenarios across different processors. A simulation model for the National Airspace System (NAS) is described and validated. The components of the simulator are described as well as the parallel simulation algorithms. Experimental results utilizing real-world traffic data for the continental U.S. are presented demonstrating the speed ups achieved by a prototype simulator. These results illustrate that time-parallel simulation can be used to significantly accelerate certain air traffic simulations.