The Metropolis 2 project makes use of the BlueSky Open Air Traffic Control Simulator for simulating traffic scenarios, to compare the three concepts created in Work Package 4. BlueSky is an open-source fast-time and real-time simulation tool developed by one of the project partners (TU Delft). The goal of BlueSky is to provide everybody who wants to visualize, analyse or simulate air traffic with a tool to do so without any licensing restrictions or limitations.
The BlueSky traffic simulation is composed by default of several different components:
- Point-mass aircraft motion based on WGS ‘84
- Multiple available aircraft performance models:
- OpenAP (the default model, open source, open data)
- BADA (coefficient files should be provided by user)
- Autopilot/FMS implementation based on conventional aviation logic
- Separation: conflict detection and conflict resolution models
- A plug-in system to allow extensions of the simulation (replacing/extending existing parts, and adding new parts) in self-contained plugins.
BlueSky was initially created for the simulation of conventional aviation, but lately, development has been directed more towards the integration of a wider range of aircraft and types of operations, especially focusing on the urban mobility domain. Current extensions already include:
- Drone-specific route following modes
- Basic geofence implementation
- Basic geovectoring implementation
The master version of BlueSky is available on GitHub. By using the Git system, any user of BlueSky can create branches (on the current repository) or forks (to a new repository) of the BlueSky source code at any point in its commit history, and add new or modified functionality in this alternative version. New changes on the master version can be merged into these forks/branches, and adaptations of a fork or branch can be merged back into the main version.
For the development of new functionalities and modifications specifically for the Metropolis 2 project, a Metropolis 2 ‘organisation’ was defined on GitHub, and a fork of the BlueSky master was added to this account, so that all work specific to the project can be stored and maintained in one place. The Metropolis 2 fork of BlueSky can be found here: https://github.com/Metropolis-2/bluesky. Each of the concept teams can then again fork this version for their individual development on their respective concepts. Finally, all concepts and auxiliary scripts will be provided online through the Metropolis 2 GitHub organisation page.
