ATAC SIMMOD Activities and Products

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ATAC SIMMODActivities and Products

• European SIMMOD
• Users Group
• Nice, France
• 7 - 8 April 2005

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General News
We moved in December! New address 755 N
Mathilda Avenue, Suite 200 Sunnyvale, CA
94085-3511 USA Tel [phone] Fax 1 408
736 8447
(unchanged)
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General News

• SIMMOD usage appears to be increasing
• New users
• Existing users have new projects after inactivity

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SIMMOD User Base
156 users (including 62 Simmod PLUS! customers)
have obtained the ATAC SIMMOD engine since the
release of version 2.5 in October 2001. These
users are from the following 32 countries
Argentina Australia Austria Bosnia and
Herzegovina Brazil Canada Chile China
Croatia Denmark Estonia France Germany Greece Indi
a Indonesia
Italy Japan Kazakhstan Malaysia Poland Russia Sout
h Africa South Korea
Spain Sweden Taiwan Thailand Turkey UK USA Vietnam

5
SIMMOD Engine Maintenance

• Engine ground logic changes since last meeting
• A flaw that would cause the engine to crash if
  the acceleration/deceleration during the
  takeoff/landing roll was zero has been fixed.

• The taxicheckpoint logic no longer erroneously
  checks for a valid departure queue for arrival
  aircraft.

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SIMMOD Engine Maintenance

• Engine ground logic changes since last meeting
• Fixed a problem in which departures would
  automatically go to a staging pad that was
  defined for their departure queue/gate/plan
  combination, even though the maximum queue
  threshold was not exceeded.

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SIMMOD Engine Maintenance

• Engine ground logic changes since last meeting
• The logic for selecting a runway exit from a
  distribution has been extensively reworked.
• The probabilities specified in the distribution
  were not properly considered.
• The logic was not considering runway plan
  directionality properly when choosing exits based
  on distributions. Distributions defined for
  either plan would be considered.
• The logic would always use the value of the
  displaced threshold in the primary direction for
  a runway, even when the aircraft was traveling in
  the opposite direction.

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SIMMOD Engine Maintenance

• Engine ground logic changes since last meeting
• The gate selection logic was originally designed
  such that when a flight is choosing from among
  available gates with identical capacity,
  preference will be given to those gates that have
  the fewest airlines assigned to them. This
  preference was erroneously deactivated in 1999
  and has now been reactivated.

• The gate selection logic would not function
  correctly if the airline identifier contained a
  number. Fixed.

9
SIMMOD Engine Maintenance

• Engine ground logic changes since last meeting
• If an aircraft was re-assigned to another gate at
  a taxicheckpoint or staging pad, it would not
  re-examine the GATERWY inputs to determine if it
  should use a different taxipath. Fixed.

10
SIMMOD Engine Maintenance

• Engine airspace logic changes since last meeting
• A flaw in the logic could cause an aircraft to
  wait indefinitely for a sector that was
  unsaturated through a SETSECT has been fixed.

• The 4-digit airspace node separation option was
  not applied correctly for aircraft arriving to a
  node. Fixed.

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SIMMOD Engine Maintenance

• Engine airspace logic changes since last meeting
• The departure procedure logic was using an
  arrival tail factor rather than a departure tail
  factor when calculating the procedure separations
  for subsequent departures. Fixed.

• When determining the separation of aircraft
  leaving a node, the logic was erroneously using
  the trailing aircrafts speed on arrival to the
  node rather than expected speed upon leaving the
  node.

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SIMMOD Engine Maintenance

• Engine airspace logic changes since last meeting
• The default value of the global variable
  node_sep_ac_choice has been changed from 0 to 2.
  When 0, the logic used the trailing aircrafts
  speed in the separation calculations. This
  approach can result in a loss of separation,
  whereas using 2, the leading aircrafts speed,
  will ensure that the desired separation is never
  lost.

13
SIMMOD Engine Maintenance

• Engine input/output changes since last meeting
• A number of erroneous messages have been
  eliminated from SIMU02 output.

• Logic has been revised to reduce memory
  consumption.

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SIMMOD Engine Maintenance

• Ongoing work for next version of the engine
• Departure queue enhancements
• User-defined groupings of departure queues
• All aircraft in the group of queues are
  considered as being in one queue.
• Useful for controlling sequencing of aircraft in
  multiple physical queues that feed the same
  runway
• Inputs for the maximum number times and maximum
  total time that an aircraft can be passed in the
  queue.
• Global data values will be changed to a departure
  queue value

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SIMMOD Engine Maintenance

• Ongoing work for next version of the engine
• Takeoff/landing rolls specified as a combination
  of runway occupancy time and exit link
• Inputs as user-defined probabilities based on
  runway/aircraft type
• Extension of the existing RUNWAY_EXIT_LINKS
  feature

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Simmod PLUS! / PRO!

• Current version of Simmod PLUS! / PRO! is 6.2.4
• Next release is version 7.1 in May 2005
• What happened to 7.0?
• It was only used within ATAC. After we made all
  the planned changes for Simmod 7.0, our chief
  programmer of the user interface proposed even
  more changes!
• Updated look-and-feel with conversion from Java
  version 1.4 ? 1.5

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Simmod PLUS! / PRO!

• Network Builder changes
• Curved ground links
• Detailed coastline
• Numerous minor improvements
• Animator changes
• Time slider
• Time incrementer/decrementer
• Greater internal precision (millisecond accuracy)

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Simmod PLUS!
Demonstration
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Simmod PRO!

• Increased modeling capability using rules-based
  input
• Define and query state variables
• Ground or airspace congestion
• Departure queue length
• Gate occupancy
• Current level of air or ground delay
• Dynamic decision-making
• Route changes based on
• Aircraft type
• Airline
• Origin/destination

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Simmod PRO!
Demonstration
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SIMMOD to INM Conversion

• Automate the creation of INM tracks and flights
  from SIMMOD output
• SIMMOD generated INM input includes delays, which
  can impact exposure-based metrics like DNL or
  CNEL with noise penalties applied to night-time
  operations
• INM runway creation not yet automated
• SIMMOD procedures allow each aircraft group to
  takeoff/land at a point other than the end of a
  runway
• SIMMOD has no glide slope and threshold crossing
  height information

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SIMMOD to INM Conversion

• Flight operations on each track are laterally
  dispersed to represent normal flight track
  deviations

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SIMMOD to INM Conversion

• Merge the output of several different SIMMOD
  scenarios to calculate an average annual day

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SIMMOD to INM Conversion
Demonstration
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End of Presentation
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General News
The ATAC Aviation Modeling Team Alex
Potier, Raymond Bea, Eric Dinges, Mark Cochran,
Vince Ticoulet, Jason Kim, Amit Sharma, Lena
Mirsky, Eric Boyajian, Dave Holl, Denise Rickel,
Alan Whitson, Jae Yu, Don Crisp, Jason Bertino

not pictured Alex Gilgur, Nicole del Rosario,
Ryan Withop