RAMS Plus : Gate-to-Gate ATM/Airport Fast-Time Simulator

RAMS Plus is a comprehensive turn-key, high-fidelity, cost-effective and easy-to-use gate-to-gate ATM/Airport fast-time simulation tool available on the familiar Windows platforms.

It is a simulation model providing decision support as applied in the design, analysis, and planning of your ATM systems.

RAMS Plus simulates traffic from a macro-to-micro level (gate-to-gate movements), where a single scenario can contain as many flights, sectors, and airports as you need, from a local to global level, to provide insights into the ATM system being studied.

RAMS Plus simulates full 4D movement of each aircraft through time, and each airplane’s dynamic interaction with other aircraft, airspace structures, airspace procedures and rules. The result is a variety of outputs that can be used to create unlimited views of aggregated metrics, measurements, and quantifications to describe the system’s behavior.

The RAMS Plus simulation package is an integrated system composed of

  • Data preparation and display system,
  • Simulation engine,
  • Graphic simulation animation, visualization tools, and report and metrics generation tools.

RAMS Plus supports advanced simulation concepts for validation of European and North American long term initiatives to investigate new ATM Concepts of Operations (ConOps). These ConOps support future growth in traffic demand and economic needs coupled with the integration of new technology and procedures, whilst accounting for environmental impacts. These ConOps are expected to offer substantial improvements to ATM performance, significantly improving safety and capacity in a cost-effective way.

RAMS Plus supports these ConOps from two directions. One direction is through the introduction of new modeling features within RAMS Plus such as airgates, path objects, resource allocation & competition, and flexible user-defined applications of time-based metering in the airspace, at the airport level, and pre-arrival streams, point merge concepts, and dynamic pair-based runway dependencies. The abstraction of these modeling features removes constraints from modeling strictly a traditional sector/controller based system. These modeling features have a successful history of applications in high-profile decision support analysis performed around the world.

In parallel, RAMS Plus participates as an agent in ATM validation platforms in support of ConOps to effectively model key features such as System Wide Information Management (SWIM), Net-centric Enabled Operations (NEO), Collaborative planning and balancing of traffic demand and capacity, user-oriented problem solving, and 4D trajectory management. RAMS Plus has been applied as an open-architecture component since 2002 and has since been successfully applied in large-scale projects by leading industry and worldwide ATM authorities. As a component in an ATM validation platform, RAMS Plus can play a variety of roles, ranging from representing the ATC and/or ATM environment, to providing 4D trajectory calculation, to providing conflict probe and/or conflict resolution services.

RAMS Plus Benefits

  • Measure proposed changes to existing ATM systems (e.g. sectorisation)
  • Study impacts of new ATM elements (e.g. new runway or airspace restricted zones)
  • Propose changes to increase airspace capacity
  • Classical controller workload analyis.
  • Unlimited “What If?” perspectives on any ATM system.
  • Save Time And Money

RAMS Plus Objectives

  • Model & Study Wide Range of ATC System & Concepts In Fast-Time
  • Provide Gate-to-Gate Operations
  • Unlimited Number Of Flights & Sectors
  • Intuitive and Quick Data Preparation
  • Geographic Independence (local To global view)
  • Rapid Comparative Analysis
  • Macro-To-Micro View (fully data driven scalability)
  • Provide Meaningful Views (reports) of Simulation Outputs

Fast-Time Modeling Objectives

Fast-time simulation tools provide a cost-effective method to quantify and measure the reliability and effectiveness of a system. The goal of this analysis is to provide support for high-level decisions related to state changes or the introduction of new procedures and technology into the system. To help answer these questions, RAMS Plus models a wide range of both present and future ATM concepts, producing analytical results in a very short time, allowing more time for comparative analysis while reducing the time for data preparation.

Comparing the results of simulation scenarios to assess relative changes offer insights to the impact and behavior of ATM planning and organizational initiatives, from high-level macro-views to in-depth micro-view scenarios. RAMS Plus scenarios can be a combination of high-level system behavior while at the same time containing highly specialized operations and rules for regions or topics of interest.