Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT) System Architecture

Abstract

The Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Environment and Energy (FAA-AEE) is developing a comprehensive suite of software tools that will allow for thorough assessment of the environmental effects of aviation. The main goal of the effort is to develop a new capability to assess the interdependencies between aviation-related noise and emissions effects, and to provide comprehensive impact and cost and benefit analyses of aviation environmental policy options. The building block of this suite of software tools that integrates existing noise and emissions models is the Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT). AEDT will provide a framework for consistent modeling and assessment of aviation environmental effects by Merging of existing tools and new modules into both a publicly available, regulatory/planning component (Local) and the policy component of AEDT (Global). The central building blocks used for the AEDT system are four existing FAA noise and emissions modeling applications: (1) Integrated Noise Model (INM) – local noise; (2) Emissions and Dispersion Modeling System (EDMS) – local emissions; (3) Model for Assessing Global Exposure to the Noise of Transport Aircraft (MAGENTA) – global noise; and (4) System for assessing Aviation’s Global Emissions (SAGE) – global emissions. This core of AEE developed applications contains the software implementations of best-practice environmental modeling and assessment techniques for aviation. Each application and its development history are summarized below. While the four core software applications noted above implement the best-practice techniques for the respective local and global, noise and emissions models for aviation, they do so in a disjointed and, in some cases, inconsistent way; this is due to their unique historic timelines and factors that previously drove development. A prime objective in the AEDT architecture design is to construct a framework for the common components of these applications to provide coupled, and thereby consistent, analysis of the physical and logical processes being modeled. The result is a new capability for assessment and/or projection that ties noise and emissions effects together. Additional objectives include improving user access and control, reducing application maintenance and distribution effort by the provider, and increasing the adoption and use of AEE models by aviation stakeholders worldwide. Given this base of objectives for the system architecture, a requirements collection phase was undertaken to gather input from the wide array of AEDT stakeholders. The first step in identifying associated requirements was a series of stakeholder workshops hosted by the National Academies of Science (NAS) Transportation Research Board (TRB). Based on this input, further definition and refinement of AEDT requirements was undertaken by the development team, These requirements were consolidated into a single, living document [AEDT Software Requirements Document, Doc #AEDT-REQ-01, 1/25/2007] to provide the development team with a set of working specifications for the software implementation and tool integration. The requirements are further dealt with below (functional) and in more detail through the requirements document.