Course of Action Simulation

Metron proposes to develop a parallel-processing discrete event simulation of the entire National Air Space that can be used to assess courses of action in response to disturbances that impact Air Traffic Management. The innovative thrust is to use the NASA-patented SPEEDES parallel-processing engine. The ability of SPEEDES to efficiently distribute processing over large numbers of processors will allow the entire National Airspace (NAS) traffic (>50,000 flights) to be simulated quickly enough to support Air Traffic Management decisions in near-real-time. The resulting simulation would allow visualization/analysis of the propagation of delays across the air traffic system and rapid assessment of the probable downstream effects of decisions. Metron has already built a ?Pre-prototype? NAS simulation on SPEEDES, which has simplified models of schedules, flights, and airports and has been run with a small subset of a day?s flights between a handful of airports. Metron proposes that during Phase I, the Pre-prototype be demonstrated and benchmarked using a typical full day?s traffic, and that a full design for a Prototype with higher fidelity models and a link to live data be completed. The Phase II objective is to complete and demonstrate the Prototype.