An Air Traffic Simulation Model That Predicts and Prevents Excess Demand

An airplane's ability to absorb delay while airborne is limited and costly. Because of this, the air traffic management system anticipates and manages excessive demand for scarce shared resources, such as arrival runways or busy airspace, so that the delay necessary for buffering can be spread out over a larger distance, or taken on the ground before departure. It is difficult to model these important dynamics in a standard queue-resource simulation framework, which does not account for limited delay absorption capacity. The modeling methodology presented here captures these dynamics by employing a large number of independent threads of execution to monitor and enforce a large number of relatively simple mathematical relationships. These relationships calculate feasible time windows for each portion of each flight. The model was implemented in the SLX simulation language. The speed and scalability of SLX are essential to the approach, which would otherwise be impractical.