Air Traffic Management

ACI staff, based at NASA Ames Research Center, are involved in projects designed to study and manage the National Airspace System (NAS). Most projects are done jointly with NASA and other contractors.

(Photo source: NASA Ames Research Center)

The Center/TRACON Automation System (CTAS) is a set of software tools to help air traffic controllers manage the increasingly complex air traffic flows around large airports. The CTAS system receives radar feed from centers, generates various graphical displays for the controller, and then projects arrival times and potential conflicts. CTAS is developed on a network of UNIX-based systems. ACI staff work with air traffic analysis tools and TCP/IP networking issues.

The Virtual Airspace Modeling and Simulation (VAMS) project aims to provide a distributed simulation environment which allows a number of specialized airspace simulation components to talk to each other. The overall VAMS implementation is in Java. ACI staff are assisting NASA Ames in evaluating the software architecture for VAMS, as well as some of the component pieces themselves.

ACI brings an extensive skill mix to the study of the National Airspace System. Team members include aeronautical engineers, pilots and flight instructors, software developers, and network engineers.