Advanced Air Mobility News

Airbus Offers Simulation Tool for AAM Testing

Airbus Offers Simulation Tool for AAM Testing

Airbus’s Acubed innovation center has developed a simulation platform for the development of a safe and sustainable Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) framework that could be applied in the future Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) industry.

The platform known as USim can simulate vehicles and operators in the real-world environment through its digital twin technology, helping researchers study UTM flight operations in different scenarios.

By simulating thousands of operations and flight hours at scale with low time and money costs, USim allows stakeholders to access and test the interoperability of their systems for a better understanding of the UTM ecosystem. It can also generate detailed data to inform UTM industry standards and “enable future operations to take flight,” according to Airbus’s Silicon Valley-based innovation center.

“Rather than operating under a centralized management and control authority, UTM is instead served by a network of entities and service providers that manage traffic based on negotiation, the sharing of data, common regulations and authoritative data,” said Scot Campbell, Project Executive, Airbus UTM, adding that simulation is an “indispensable tool” to explore the complexity of UTM.

The development process of USim has been supported by more than 100 stakeholders including NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), and Eurocontrol, an organization for civil-military aviation coordination in Europe.

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