Digital tower simulator

EUROCONTROL’s digital tower simulator, housed at our Innovation Hub in Brétigny, Paris, is a flexible prototyping and validation platform capable of covering most airport configurations.

It allows air navigation service providers (ANSPs), airports, industry and research institutes to perform efficient demonstrations, validate new systems, specify implementation requirements, test new configurations and safety tools, conduct training and validate industrial prototypes.

It can adapt to different airports’ needs and allows the implementation of industrial prototypes such as guidance, routing and airport safety nets. The simulator can be configured to include a large number of controller positions as well as pseudo-pilot positions that manage aircraft and vehicle movements.

Unlike a traditional control tower working environment which frequently consists of an assembly of individual systems, each with an independent interface and with no common information management, our digital tower simulator offers an integrated approach to controller working position design and operations through its integrated tower working position (ITWP).

ITWP includes all tower control positions (runway control, ground movement control and clearance delivery), and integrates current and new air traffic control systems into a configurable working position supported by associated operational procedures. It has an advanced human-machine interface (HMI) presented on a large touchscreen for each controller’s working position, which improves situational awareness, human performance and safety. In simulation mode, it is supported by an “out of the window view”.

Our digital tower simulator has been used to validate multiple SESAR concepts, and includes the following functions:

• A-SMGCS Airport Safety Nets for Controllers
• A-SMGCS Routing function
• A-SMGCS Guidance function: such as Airfield Lighting and Automated "Follow the greens"
• RECAT and Time-Based Separation
• GBAS-enabled concepts such as Adaptive Threshold and Glide Slope.

The platform is the property of EUROCONTROL, developed using the GSDK (Graffica System Development Kit) offered by © Graffica Ltd, and is provided free of charge to its Member States.

Our digital tower simulator can be used in stand-alone mode, or connected to our ESCAPE ATC and cockpit simulators sharing the same data preparation tool.

While the simulator offers generic airport environments for major and regional European airports, new environments can be easily configured.

All the simulations are recorded so users can download the simulated exercises and rerun them for further analysis.

We continue to develop our digital tower simulator, whose modular architecture allows us to integrate easily future functionalities such as guidance-augmented reality and voice recognition technologies, both of which are designed to help controllers handle more capacity, and assist them in challenging situations including drone incursions.