Implementation of a Flight Control Tower Simulator using Commercial Off-the-shelf Hardware

Abstract

Simulation is an effective training method for air traffic control to ensure the safety and efficiency of the aviation industry, which is growing quickly. In this paper, the key techniques are explored in the implementation of a cost-effective approach to constructing a flight control tower simulator using commodities. A client/server styled architecture is proposed to divide the system into subsystems, and a process model is abstracted to describe the high-level process of the system. Finite state machines (FSMs) and a primitive—command interaction mechanism are proposed for efficient behavior representation and flexible control of the simulated entities (which are encapsulated into a computing kernel component to handle the real-time computation and interaction), respectively, resulting in higher maintainability and extensibility. Parallel rendering based on a PC cluster and image warping and edge blending algorithms are explored to generate virtual tower out-the-window scenes of ultra-high resolutions and seamless tiled displays on a cylindrical screen, respectively; thus the special hardware is replaced with commercial off-the-shelf hardware to achieve much lower cost and higher maintainability. With these techniques, a flight control tower simulator based on COTS hardware has been implemented and employed to train some tower controllers in China.