Air traffic generation for new terminal area air traffic management concepts design and evaluation

This paper describes two systems that can be used to obtain realistic random traffic samples in a terminal area: a real traffic analyser and a synthetic traffic generator. These two systems allow the air traffic management (ATM) engineer to gain insight on the traffic structure of the area under analysis, and allow obtaining realistic traffic samples enabling the evaluation of new operational concepts, the validation or system performance measurement after procedure changes, the analysis of ATM performance under forecasted future traffic changes, etc. Together with the design of the system, the work provides insight of user interfaces and describes the potential uses of such tools in an integrated ATM system.