A fast-time simulation environment for airborne merging and spacing research

As part of NASA's distributed air/ground traffic management (DAG-TM) effort, NASA Langley Research Center is developing concepts and algorithms for merging multiple aircraft arrival streams and precisely spacing aircraft over the runway threshold. An airborne tool has been created for this purpose, called airborne merging and spacing for terminal arrivals (AMSTAR). To evaluate the performance of AMSTAR and complement human-in-the-loop experiments, a simulation environment has been developed that enables fast-time studies of AMSTAR operations. The environment is based on TMX, a multiple-aircraft desktop simulation program created by the Netherlands National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR). This paper reviews the AMSTAR concept, discusses the integration of the AMSTAR algorithm into TMX and the enhancements added to TMX to support fast-time AMSTAR studies, and presents initial simulation results.