American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics 1 Build 4 of the Airspace Concept Evaluation System Larry Meyn * and Robert Windhorst † NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 95006 Karlin Roth ‡ NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC 20546 Donald Van Drei § NASA Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, OH 44135 Greg Kubat ** Analex Corp., Brook Park, OH 44142 Vikram Manikonda †† Intelligent Automation, Inc., Rockville, MD 20855 Sharlene Roney ‡‡ SAIC, Alexandria, VA 22312 and George Hunter §§ , Alex Huang *** , and George Couluris ††† Sensis Corp., Campbell, CA 95008 The Airspace Concept Evaluation System (ACES) is a non-real-time, computer simulation of local, regional and national aircraft operations from gate departure to gate arrival. The overarching objective is to provide a flexible National Airspace System (NAS) simulation and modeling environment that can assess the impact of new NAS tools, concepts, and architectures, including those that represent a significant departure from the existing NAS operational paradigm. Two of the major development goals of ACES are the ability to configure simulations that target specific analysis needs and the ability to model the interactions of the numerous command and control entities that are part of current NAS operations and in future operational concepts. ACES development has been ongoing for several years, with the first version of ACES, Build 1, being delivered in March 2003. The most recent version of ACES, Build 4, was released in December 2005. This paper serves as overview to the features and capabilities of ACES Build 4 and the ways it differs from previous versions. A number of tools for preparing ACES scenarios and analyzing ACES outputs are also described to give potential users an understanding of how ACES can be used. * Aerospace Engineer, Aerospace Operations Modeling Branch, MS 210-10, and AIAA Associate Fellow. † Chief, Aerospace Operations Modeling Branch, MS 210-10, and AIAA Senior Member. ‡ Program Director, Airspace Systems and AIAA Associate Fellow. § Senior Communication Research Engineer. ** Branch Manager. †† Vice President. ‡‡ Senior Systems Engineer. §§ Senior Scientist and AIAA Member. *** System Engineer and AIAA Member. ††† Senior Scientist and AIAA Member. AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies Conference and Exhibit 21 - 24 August 2006, Keystone, Colorado AIAA 2006-6110 This material is declared a work of the U.S. Government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States.