Mercury: an open source platform for the evaluation of air transport mobility

The Mercury simulator is a platform developed over several years during exploratory research projects. It features a detailed description of the air transportation system at the European level, including passengers and aircraft, plus various important actors such as the Network Manager, airports, etc. This article presents the possibilities offered by the simulator’s last and now open-source version. We describe the core Mercury functionalities and highlight its modularity and the possibility of using it with other tools. We present its new interface, which supports user-friendly interaction, exploring its data input/output and setting its various parameters. We emphasise its possible uses as a solution performance assessment tool, usable early in the innovation pipeline to better estimate the impact of new changes to the air transportation system, particularly with respect to other system components. We hope opening the simulator may encourage other models to become available, allowing faster prototyping of SESAR Solutions early in the innovation pipeline and an in fine standardisation and higher performance of simulation-based performance assessment tools.