NextGen AGENTFLY

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The project is aimed at distributed simulation and control of civilian air traffic over the National Air Space (NAS) of the United States. It also serves as a tool for validation of algorithms proposed for the NextGen concept.

The implementation relies on the underlying Core AGENTFLY system. Its architecture has been designed and developed specifically to support execution of large-scale simulations featuring tens of thousands of airplanes. The system employs methods of automatic load balancing in realtime which ensure an efficient execution of the distributed simulation on the given number of computers.

Air traffic over the entire airspace of the Earth can be simulated, with positions of airplanes described by their GPS coordinates.

NextGen AGENTFLY has been successfully used for simulation of more than 50,000 airplanes flying within the National Air Space, based on real air traffic data spanning one day provided by FAA. During peek hours of the simulated air traffic, there were around 6,000 airplanes being managed at once.

The system has been integrated with real-world data describing current weather conditions (namely the wind), as well as geometry and time constraints of Special Use Airspaces (SUAs) which the airplanes are not allowed to enter during their flight. The technical characteristics implemented by the software models of airplanes are taken from the existing Base of Aircraft Data (BADA) specifications. The actual data were provided by FAA and EUROCONTROL.

Each airplane is simulated by an agent responsible for flight path planning for the particular airplane, and negotiation with other airplanes (i.e. the corresponding agents) over detected conflicts in planned trajectories, which allows safe, collision-free operation of multiple airplanes within the same air space.

In order to ensure safety of all flights and prevent separation violations, conflicts of airplanes’ flight paths are resolved automatically either in a cooperative or non-cooperative manner, depending on the ability and/or willingness of the involved airplanes to communicate.

The system also provides built-in tools for realtime collection and subsequent evaluation and analysis of behavior of the system under various conditions. This has enabled us to perform measurements and experiments analyzing a number of air-traffic situations and system configurations.

The project has been supported by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and by the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.

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