ACCES - A gaming and simulation platform for advanced airport operations concepts

This paper describes DLR’s Airport Control Center Simulator “ACCES”, a platform designed for ATM related validation activities. This platform is specifically useful to conduct gaming exercises coupled with real-time simulations. Gaming has been used for several decades in strategic military planning (“war games”) and also in operations research. The fundamental idea is to provide a scenario and a set of actions that can be performed by the actors in the game. These actions affect the scenario in a clearly specified way. In addition there is a set of rules defining when and how actions may be performed by specific actors. The result of a gaming exercise will usually be a certain state of the scenario, derived from the initial scenario, which has been effected by the actions performed during the game. Gaming exercises can be conducted “paper based” and coupled with simulation. In the first case the evolvement of the scenario given specific actions of the actors is written down in a rule set that is handed out to the actors. A game master will conduct the experiment and track the state of the scenario. When coupled to a simulation the actions performed by the participants will directly influence the simulated environment, so that the degree of realism or immersion felt by the actors can be greatly increased. Lately gaming has been also used to study new air traffic management concepts. One project that has studied the use of gaming techniques in this area is the European 6th framework project EPISODE-3, which focused on innovative validation methods to be applied to the Single European Skies ATM Research (SESAR) program. In this project both paper based and simulation coupled gaming exercises have been performed. One of these exercises, dealing with collaborative airport planning, has been performed at DLR using the ACCES platform. The ACCES has been designed as a highly flexible research and validation facility for ATM and airport operations research. It provides a large projection screen to display an overview of the situation or other information relevant to all actors in the exercise. In addition there are eight operator working positions equipped with up to four screens that can be connected to a number of computers on which the simulation and planning tools can run. A separate room provides additional working positions (without projections screen) to simulate a remote control room, e.g. an Airline Operations Center