FACTS2: A service oriented simulation framework for aeronautical communication system evaluation

The modernization of the European air transportation system will increase the need for data communication. This creates the need for large-scale simulations to ascertain that new aeronautical communication systems fulfil the requirements of future air traffic management communication. This paper presents a framework for such simulations based on service-oriented software architecture. The Framework for Aeronautical Communications and Traffic Simulations 2 (FACTS2) is based on the concept of service oriented simulation creating complex simulations from simple software building blocks called “services”. Separating the tasks of services appropriately allows for natural parallelization at the service level. FACTS2 was applied to the simulation of European reference air traffic for the years 2007 to 2035 that will provide the basis for future aeronautical communication evaluations. It could be shown that the service-oriented simulation approach offers significant performance gains through parallelization scaling linearly with the number of available CPUs. The air traffic simulation results were validated against published simulation results to verify their correctness.