Air/Ground Communications Traffic Modeling Capability for the Mid-Level Model (MLM)

The Mid-Level Model (MLM) simulates the flow of aircraft in the National Airspace System (NAS), and is used for capacity and delay analyses. Prior to the effort documented in this report, MLM did not account for the communications events that transpire, and the related communications messages that would ensue, as the simulated aircraft are moving through the NAS. In order to properly engineer current and future air/ground (A/G) communications systems, it is necessary to quantify the communications traffic that those systems are expected to serve. This document describes the capability added to MLM during fiscal year 2005 (FY05) to identify communications message triggering events, and to generate the appropriate voice or data communications messages.