A Parallel Simulation Approach to ACAS X Development

Abstract

With a rapidly growing and evolving National Airspace System (NAS), ACAS X is intended to be the nextgeneration airborne collision avoidance system that can meet the demands its predecessor could not. The ACAS X algorithms are developed in the Julia programming language and are exercised in simulation environments tailored to test different characteristics of the system. Massive parallelization of these simulation environments has been implemented on the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center cluster in order to expedite the design and performance optimization of the system. This work outlines the approach to parallelization of one of our simulation tools and presents the resulting simulation speedups as well as a discussion on how it will enhance system characterization and design. Parallelization has made our simulation environment 33 times faster, which has greatly sped up the development process of ACAS X.