Modeling of Terrain Awareness and Warning System (TAWS) for Fixed-Wing Aircraft

Abstract

In this paper, the Terrain Awareness and Warning System (TAWS), a system responsible for guiding aircraft safely into terrain, has been modeled, analyzed, and simulated using MATLAB and Simulink. Firstly, the Virtual Reality (VR) environment has been created by generating terrain using the elevation values extracted from an open-source terrain database and adding an aircraft controllable through Simulink. Secondly, an algorithm to predict the aircraft’s position after a specified time interval has been developed. It also extracts and returns the terrain elevation value at the predicted position and compares it with the aircraft’s altitude. Finally, suitable aural and visual warnings have been generated and displayed in the animation window based on comparison. The model can further be integrated into a real-time flight simulation environment serving various purposes, such as design and development, concept demonstration, system assessment, test and validation, and so on.