Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IMLCAST Vehicle is a comprehensive fast time simulation tool for modelling and evaluating apron ground traffic at airports. It is based on state-of-the-art multi-agent technology with interactive simulation of both processes and traffic. With CAST Vehicle new concepts and strategies can rapidly be evaluated in scalable levels of detail, e.g. to identify bottlenecks, plan resources or assess a system‘s capacity.
CAST Vehicle can be used as a stand-alone module or as an integral part of the CAST product family created by Airport Research Center GmbH. It was developed by Fraunhofer IML Project Center Aviation Logistics in cooperation with Fraport AG and ARC from 2005 to 2008.
CAST Vehicle includes a sophisticated schedule-based dynamic traffic generator. It takes into account flight load information, e.g. passengers, baggage, cargo and mail, as well as individual ground handler contracts and their dispatching strategies.
A routing module provides automated routing of vehicles close to reality. Vehicles find their routes considering blockings by taxiing aircraft and current traffic situations on route segments. CAST Vehicle includes a microscopic traffic model with vehicle following, lane changing and overtaking behaviour.
Various performance indicators can be logged for extensive analysis. They can already be assessed during the simulation run via simulation-synchronous animation and online analysis functionalities such as graphs, colour-coding or labeling.