Communications, navigation, and surveillance events simulation for the national airspace system

The national airspace system (NAS) is a large and complex system encompassing a wide-range of resources to enable safe and efficient air transportation. To effectively manage the NAS, it is very important to be able to reliably assess current and future demand for communications, navigation, and surveillance (CNS) resources as they are triggered by air traffic control (ATC) events. The authors present an integrated model that is capable of relating NAS ATC events to NAS CNS demand. Model validation with a subset of recorded ETMS CNS statistics are presented. Combining such a model with NAS future demand predictors such as terminal area forecasts (TAF) and future aviation timetable estimator (FATE), it becomes possible to estimate the increase in CNS demand and future requirements for CNS capacity, for resource planning purposes. The model presented in this paper includes tracking of radar-related messages and sector workload.