An air traffic control simulator for test and development of airspace management schemes

With the advent of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operation in controlled airspace, it has become of increasing need to improve air traffic control resources to handle safe and cooperative interaction of all aircrafts. Existing international protocols such as ADS-B have proven an adequate platform to digitize and automate the exchange of position data to ground control and other aircraft but a system does not yet exist to exchange command and control data to manned or unmanned aircraft other than by the use of airband radio. Next-generation air traffic control systems have been proposed which build on automatic position reporting in order to manage large numbers of manned and unmanned aircraft with minimal human intervention - especially for fully automated flight platforms operating in or near controlled airspaces. Integrating UAVs into general airspace introduces new questions about congestion management for tightly controlled airspace and airports, communications schemes and failure rates, collision avoidance schemes for ad-hoc aircraft encounters, contingency planning, and scalability when it comes to handling large aircraft densities managed by finite ground air traffic control infrastructure. Addressing these challenges, a diverse collection of proposed theoretical solutions from research, industry and policy makers are working to meet these challenges and define various aspects of the next generation of airspace management. To qualify and validate these efforts, we present and demonstrate a simulation toolkit which allows simultaneous communications channel modeling and physical environment modeling to evaluate the efficacy of a communications policy and air traffic management scheme. Our simulation toolkit allows exploration of control solutions based on theoretical decentralized communication architectures where every aircraft broadcasts the aircraft state, future intentions and agrees with other aircraft on proceedings to safely navigate the airspace in accordance with pre-programmed or on-the-fly air traffic instructions. In addition to presenting the simulator, we present runtime results which address environments where non-moving aircrafts join air traffic, demonstrate the capacity of a system to handle emergency states, report incorrect sensory transmission events, and enforce incursion rules to restricted airspaces.