American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics 1 Efficient Air Traffic Scenario Generation Mr. David B. Signor * and Mr. Paul Davis † Seagull Technology, Campbell, CA, 95008 Ms. Sandra C. Lozito ‡ NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, 94035 Dr. Anthony D. Andre § Interface Analysis Associates, Morgan Hill, CA, 95037 Mr. Doug Sweet ** and Ms. Erin Wallace †† Seagull Technology, Campbell, CA, 95008 A significant investment has and continues to be made by the FAA, NASA, and other organizations to improve the state of the National Airspace System (NAS) and avoid the impending air traffic grid-lock. Much of this effort involves developing and testing new concepts to improve the efficiency and safety of the NAS. Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) simulations play an important part in evaluating critical human factors issues related to these new concepts. The current method of developing HITL scenarios tends to be a highly iterative, labor intensive process. This paper describes the ongoing research and development of a software tool intended to significantly increase the efficiency of researchers generating and manipulating scenario data for real-time HITL air traffic simulators. This goal is achieved by allowing researchers to quickly and easily generate and evaluate scenarios on a single desktop computer rather than using a target simulator to create scenarios. The tool, AvScenario, is a modern graphically oriented application that automates and simplifies many of the tasks associated with scenario generation. AvScenario is a general-purpose tool that will work with multiple input data formats and produce generically formatted scenario data that can be targeted to specific simulators. I. Introduction Fast-time simulations of the NAS are widely used to investigate current and future aspects of the NAS and generally require fewer resources (time and money) than real-time simulations. However, real-time simulations remain an essential step in the process of evaluating specific concepts at a more detailed operational level, specifically evaluation of human performance. These detailed evaluations are required prior to fielding new procedures and Decision Support Tools (DST). A combination of both real-time and fast-time simulations is required to investigate concepts designed to increase NAS capacity. Generating scenarios for real-time simulators is currently a resource intensive activity. Typically the design of a simulator does not concentrate on generation and manipulation of input data, but instead is focused on the execution of the simulation. When scenario generation capabilities are provided, these scenario generation methods are tightly coupled to a specific simulator and cannot be used to generate or manipulate scenarios for other simulators. Additionally there is growing emphasis in building distributed real-time simulators, which tie together legacy systems to simulate more aspects of the NAS in one simulation. This requires that scenarios be capable of working * Systems Engineer, AIAA Member † Director of Software Development ‡ Research Psychologist, M/S 262-4 § IAA Founding Principal ** Manager of Air Transportation Services Group †† Software Engineer AIAA 4th Aviation Technology, Integration and Operations (ATIO) Forum 20 - 22 September 2004, Chicago, Illinois AIAA 2004-6399 Copyright © 2004 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.