Validation Facilities in the Area of ATM Bottleneck Investigation

Due to the steady growth of commercial air transport, demand often leads capacity. An increase of capacity while maintaining the same or higher level of safety can only be achieved by introducing new systems and/or procedures, which can be developed and validated with the help of validation facilities prior to real life operation. The validation facilities of DLR's Institute of Flight Guidance with their flexibility and scalability permit a wide range of adaptation to specific goals of development and validation. This paper focuses on the following realtime human-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation facilities: 1) Air Traffic Management and Operations Simulator (ATMOS); 2) Apron and Tower Simulator (ATS); 3) Airport and Control Centre Simulator (ACCES); and 4) Generic Cockpit Simulator (GECO). It is possible to perform small tests with only one facility or even a sub-part of it involved, as well as up to large distributed simulations with several networked facilities and the associated amount of operators, thus the scalability covers a wide range of experiments. These possibilities of conducting simulations can focus on isolated or widespread objectives, depending on the complexity of interrelation between the areas of interest