Enhancement in realism of ATC simulations by improving aircraft behaviour models

This paper addresses the challenge to provide realistic aircraft behaviours in air traffic control simulations. Many simulation environments lack actual information on aircraft, airline or airspace-specific operational procedures: they resort to generic procedures to navigate the simulated aircraft, which may result in unsatisfying aircraft behaviours. A methodology has been developed by EURO-CONTROL to improve the aircraft behaviour model in its large-scale and real-time air traffic management simulation system, by identifying specific aircraft operation parameters from historical radar data. The simulator has been adapted to take these aircraft operation parameters into account, and the methodology was applied and tested during the last two simulations which took place at the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre in 2010. The results of using operationally-tuned parameters during those simulations demonstrate that the analysis of flight recordings can bring valuable information about numerous flight behaviour parameters, and that the use of detailed flight behaviour models based on the parameters identified from the recordings can improve the accuracy of aircraft modeling enough that air traffic controllers liken the simulated traffic to a real traffic.