Paper accepted for SID 2011

We're off to Toulouse as part of SID (SESAR Innovation Day) 2011.  Actually 3 days, during which we hope for plenty of networking and discussion about our project.  Got our paper accepted - you can read it here.

Google Earth Visualisation

One thing RAMS Plus doesn't do so well is give you a 3D idea of what is happening in the airspace, so we've explored using Google Earth for this.  It's relatively easy to use the flight outputs from RAMS and convert these to a series of latitude, longitude and altitude points to view in Google Earth.  You can save them as a *.kml file using a little utility called EarthPlot (though there are several others out there).  By loading up successive files of individual flights, different colours can be overlaid.

RAMS Plus selected for fast time simulation environment

The result of meetings with ISA Software Ltd have led us to select the RAMS Plus gate-to-gate simulation environment for the ASHiCS project.  Essential to our choice was their offer to let us use an API that would permit changes to air traffic during simulations.  The API was originally written to conform to National Air Space model (FAA / USA) as part of the NextGen programme.  The API is in C++ and provides a message passing infrastructure between information consumers and providers, of which RAMS Plus can act as both.

We'll post more details of how the API works with RAMS Plus in later articles.