Development of the future aeronautical subnetworks traffic evaluator (FASTE) for CNS systems

The FASTE-CNS project is the first phase of a software-based set of tools to assist in the complex task of estimating and modeling aeronautical traffic for future operational environments; including general aviation, business aviation and commercial air transport. Traffic estimating involves two major activities: determination of transactional loads and determination of aircraft densities for the region of interest. Transactional analysis involves understanding the applications using aeronautical communications. Examples of these applications include owner operational control, weather, air traffic control, surveillance, navigation and passenger related activities. The services supported by these applications cause air-to-ground communication transactions to occur throughout the duration of the flight. This creates traffic loads on the communication media systems that are used to form the communications channels of the aeronautical subnetwork. These media channels are often shared mechanisms, and thus, the aircraft density within a given airspace region is the other important factor in performing communication traffic forecasts. FASTE-CNS provides a web-based means for the system engineering community to collaborate on producing traffic forecasts. The system provides a means to model the resource use of the media channels. This collaboration yields benefits in providing a shared understanding of system resource use and reduces the cost of recurring traffic forecast analysis.