Time- and space-parallel simulation of air traffic networks

Abstract

Computer simulations are widely used to design and evaluate air traffic systems. A fast time simulation capability is essential to effectively explore the consequences of decisions in airspace design, air traffic management, and operations. A parallel simulation approach is proposed to accelerate fast time simulation of air traffic networks that exploits both temporal and spatial parallelisms. A time-parallel algorithm is first described that simulates different time intervals concurrently and uses a fix up computation that exploits the scheduled nature of commercial air traffic to address the problem of dependencies between time segments. The time-parallel algorithm is then extended with a space-parallel simulation approach using Time Warp to simulate each time segment in parallel thereby increasing the amount of parallelism that can be exploited. The time and space-parallel algorithms are evaluated using a simulation of the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS). Experimental data is presented demonstrating that this approach can achieve greater acceleration than what can be achieved by exploiting time-parallel or space-parallel simulation techniques alone.