Rapid Generation and Utilization of Four-Dimensional Trajectories for Air Traffic Control and Management Applications in MACS

The Multi-Aircraft Control System (MACS) enables evaluation of Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) concepts with full-scale, real-time, human-in-the-loop simulation of complex air traffic control scenarios involving thousands of aircraft and large numbers of professional air traffic control personnel. MACS emulates current day controller displays and functionality, and implements a wide variety of advanced displays and controls including four-dimensional trajectories, interactive trajectory planning, automatic conflict detection and resolution, sector load histograms, weather probe and avoidance, automatic spacing, scheduling, and timelines. At the heart of these capabilities is software to rapidly and accurately generate and maintain trajectories. In this paper we describe MACS trajectories, how they are used, how they are generated and maintained, the different types of trajectories, MACS trajectory optimizations, and performance data.