Development of Traffic Visualization Tool for Visualizing and Analyzing Traffic in National Airspace System

An interactive, expandable, two-dimensional, Java-based traffic visualization tool that has been developed for the National Airspace System Digital Twin to support air traffic management research. The visualization tool is designed to acquire data from sources including databases, files, and servers and render airspace elements, geographical information, flown and predicated flight trajectories, historical and real-time air traffic and weather, as well as data recorded during simulation runs. The visualization tool has been used for discrete- and real-time simulations and post-simulation analyses. The development of the visualization tool has four design goals: ease of code base access, ease of data source connectivity, component reusability, and software extensibility. This document describes the user interface design, software capabilities and features of the visualization tool. The author hopes that the code base can be used by aviation projects to reduce software development and maintenance time, thereby increasing productivity.