The Airspace Operations Laboratory (AOL) at NASA Ames Research Center

The Airspace Operations Laboratory (AOL) at NASA Ames Research Center hosts a powerful simulation environment for human-in-the-loop studies of air traffic operations. The capabilities have been developed at NASA Ames and cover a wide range of operational environments from current day operations to future operational concepts like those envisioned for the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NGATS). The research focus in the AOL is on examining air traffic control and management operations across multiple air traffic control sectors in rich air/ground environments that can include oceanic, enroute and terminal airspace. Past research involving the AOL includes distributed air/ground traffic management studies on trajectory negotiation, airborne self-separation and airborne spacing. Ongoing research with various government and industry partners include trajectory-oriented operations with limited delegation; multi sector planning; the US tailored arrivals initiative; airline-based sequencing and spacing, and airborne merging and spacing. In the future we expect using the AOL extensively for early exploration of operational questions crucial to the NGATS, like human-automation interaction, roles and responsibilities in distributed environments and required automation capabilities. This paper first gives an overview over philosophy, physical layout, software and connectivity of the AOL. Next, the available real-time capabilities are described in detail followed by a description of some important offline capabilities. The paper concludes with a summary of past and present research in the AOL and concluding remarks.