Développement d’un simulateur numérique pour le comportement des aéronefs au sol de l’Aéroport international Montréal-Trudeau

Abstract

The continuous growth of air traffic is placing increasing pressure on airports, as their physical capacity is not expanding at the same rate as the number of operations to be handled. Ground operations, defined as the maneuvers performed by an aircraft between the runway and the gate, represent a major operational and environmental challenge. Yet no existing simulation tool combines, within a single environment, the replay of historical trajectories, cooperative routing of aircraft, and real-time environmental estimation. This work presents the development of a georeferenced digital simulator of ground operations at Montréal-Trudeau International Airport (CYUL), implemented in C++ within Unreal Engine 5. The full-scale 3D environment allows historical trajectories reconstructed from Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data to be replayed. Controllable aircraft are also routed on a line graph encoding the airport’s operational constraints, using a Windowed Hierarchical Cooperative A* (WHCA*) algorithm. A model based on the Boeing Fuel Flow Method 2 (BFFM2) computes and displays, in real time, the fuel consumption and pollutant emissions of each aircraft. Functional validation confirmed the consistency of the replayed trajectories, the effectiveness of cooperative routing in avoiding conflicts, and the reliability of the environmental model. The simulator therefore constitutes a relevant analysis and decision support tool, although its validation remains limited to the CYUL case and relies on comparisons rather than real measurements. Future work is recommended to refine the aircraft dynamics model, validate the environmental model against real measurements, and test the generalization of the simulator to other airports.

Date	19 Aug 2026
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Georges Ghazi (Supervisor) & Ruxandra Botez (Co-supervisor)