AirSpaceSim: Aircraft Simulation and Airspace Visualisation

Project Overview

AirSpaceSim is a modular Python library designed for simulating aircraft movement within defined airspaces and visualising their flight paths on an interactive map.

Built with extensibility in mind, AirSpaceSim handles multi-threaded aircraft simulations, manages complex flight routes, and facilitates the rendering of real-time aircraft positions using a web-based map interface.

Key Features

• Multi-threaded Aircraft Simulation: Simulate numerous aircraft concurrently, each following its predefined route and updating its position dynamically.
• Waypoint-Based Route Management: Define and manage flight paths using a series of waypoints, with support for both Degrees, Minutes, Seconds (DMS) and decimal coordinate formats.
• Interactive Map Visualisation: Utilises Leaflet.js to render an interactive map displaying aircraft, routes, and custom airspace elements in real-time.
• Dynamic Aircraft Tracking: Aircraft markers on the map are updated frequently, showing their current position, callsign, and speed.
• Configurable Settings: Easily customise simulation parameters, data paths, and map settings via a central configuration file.
• Command-Line Interface (CLI) Tools: Includes convenient commands for project initialisation (airspacesim init)
• Geographical Utilities: Provides helper functions for precise geographical calculations, including DMS to decimal conversions and Haversine distance calculations.

Installation Instructions

To get AirSpaceSim up and running, follow these steps:

1. Create a Virtual Environment (Recommended): It's highly recommended to use a virtual environment to manage project dependencies:

   python3 -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: `venv\Scripts\activate`

2. Installation:

   From Source First, clone the AirSpaceSim repository to your local machine:

   git clone https://github.com/sankarebarri/AirSpaceSim.git
   cd AirSpaceSim

   Using pip

   pip install airspacesim

Example Usage (How to Get Started)

Once installed, you can quickly set up and run your first simulation:

1. Initialise Your Project Space: Use the CLI tool to set up the necessary project directories and default configuration files:

   airspacesim init

   This command will create (if they don't exist), map.html, map_renderer.js, aircraft_simulation.js, default_airspace_config.json, aircraft_data.jsonn, example_simulation.py in your project's root.

2. Run the Simulation: Start the aircraft manager, which will run the simulation in the background and update aircraft_data.json:

   python example_simulation.py

   You will see log messages indicating aircraft movement.

3. View the Map Visualisation: Open the map.html file in your web browser. This HTML page will load the interactive map and use airspacesim/static/js/aircraft_simulation.js to fetch and display the real-time aircraft positions from the data(routes and aircraft) defined in the example_simulation.py

4. Add Your First Aircraft: Open the new_aircraft.json file (created by airspacesim init) and add an entry for your aircraft, linking it to the route you just created. The simulation will pick up aircraft from this file.

   {
       "aircraft": [
           {
           "id": "AC003",
           "route": "UG859",
           "callsign": "AC03"
           }
       ]
   }

Links to Further Documentation and Contribution Guidelines

• Detailed Documentation: [Link to Sphinx Docs / ReadTheDocs]
• Contributing Guide: [Link to CONTRIBUTING.md]
• Issue Tracker: [Link to GitHub Issues page]
• License: See the LICENSE file for details.