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What is NASPAC ?

NASPAC refers to an integrated set of computer program modules designed to model the entire National Airspace System, the en-route structure and traffic flows, as a network of inter-related components, reflecting the effects of weather conditions, air-traffic control procedures, and air-carrier operating practices. NASPAC uses a mixture of intelligent error-checking, high processing speed, and fine tuned control of simulation runs to accelerate assessments of NAS performance.

NASPAC Objective

NASPAC provides a long-term analysis tool to aid in designing, developing, and managing the National Airspace System, through the application of modern operations research and computer modeling tools. The NASPAC project team maintains the capability to evaluate the National Airspace System performance, and provides quantitative analyses to determine the impacts of proposed or projected changes to the overall aviation system.

NASPAC Features

• A comprehensive set of preprocessors to extract flight legs from the airline schedule data, assemble flight legs into itineraries, assign arrival and departure fixes for each route, capture flight leg routes from operational databases, and create 4D trajectories for schedules or unscheduled traffic demand.
• Analysis of departure delays for flights to airports affected by ground delay programs.
• An intelligent Run Manager that enables users to assemble batch simulation runs and to check each simulation iteration for errors.
• A simulation engine that models aircraft operations from gate to gate and incorporates flight cancellation and slot swapping, 4D aircraft trajectories, and ground stops.
• Future Demand Generation
• Cost of Delay Module
• A data post-processor that displays simulation results in several formats, including animation, bar charts, graphs, and tabular reports.

NASPAC Platform

The most current version of NASPAC executes in a Unix environment on a Sun Microsystems UltraSparc processor running the (SUNOS 5.8) SOLARIS 2.8 operating system.

Further Information

NASPAC is maintained by the Simulation and Analysis Group, Systems Analysis Division, FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center, Atlantic City Airport NJ 08405.
The NASPAC effort is sponsored by the FAA Office of System Architecture and Investment Analysis (ASD)
For more information contact: douglas.baart@faa.gov

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