The right choice for a greener flight To cope with the continuous increase in the number of flights, satellite navigation receivers are installed in aircraft to assist pilots from taking off to landing. An EU-funded project provided new technology for the adoption of satellite navigation in regional flights as well.ADAVES provides an end-to-end realistic simulation infrastructure, makes available simulation scenarios with large number of aircrafts (different GPS Receivers) all within the same consistent GNSS environment, however considering different local effects in each Receiver. Climate Change and Environment © Thinkstock The development of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) has allowed the automation of in-flight tasks as well as the improvement of methodologies for determining the optimal flight path. Even when weather conditions change, pilots can determine their position reliably and select alternatives paths for accessing busy airports to make substantial savings in time and fuel. The objective of the 'Advanced avionics equipment simulation' (ADAVES) project was to develop a high fidelity and accuracy GPS system simulation, capable of being seemly integrated in Green Regional Aircraft (GRA) flight simulator. ADAVES project main goal is to support the green FMS (Flying Model Simulator) system development, through the development of a GNSS Receiver Simulator and related GNSS Constellation Simulator. The interactive Green Regional Aircraft (GRA) flight simulator has been developed to assess the benefits in terms of environmental impact of a new flight management system. The researchers' part of the work covered the design of a simulated satellite system, which will broadcast a signal used to pinpoint the aircraft position. Both ADAVES Receiver and Constellation simulators will enable to infer the available GNSS (even considering the set of error introduced by the different local effects and associated mitigations) will be an added value in the green FMS goal. The Constellation Simulator is responsible for simulating the GPS constellation accurately. It produces navigation messages for each satellite in the constellation and broadcast them to the running Receiver Simulators. The Receiver Simulator(s) performs a realistic simulation of multiple GPS receivers while considering sources of errors (such as, signal obstruction due to terrain geography, scintillation effects, noise power, antenna pattern, relativistic, satellite clock, Doppler shift, troposphere and ionosphere delay, multipath effect) and also performing error attenuation, as a real GPS receiver would. The user can also trigger the simulation of failures and malfunctions. The Receiver Simulator computes its navigation solution containing the GPS time, position, velocity, track angle, integrity limit, figure of merit, dilution of precision, RAIM and PRAIM data, providing it to the FMS. By the end of the project, the positioning system simulator was created and successfully tested. Finally, the ADAVES simulator was integrated into the final configuration of the GRA flight simulator for testing, which was scheduled to begin in autumn 2013. Flight simulations will focus on meeting the Clean Sky target of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions as well as noise. Keywords Flight, satellite navigation, GNSS, regional aircraft, simulator, flight management, GPS, Galileo, Clean Sky
