Scalable High Performance Simulation of Large Scale UAV Swarms

Aydos F., Cobankaya M., Akca H. R., ARSLAN H., Bayri B., Oznurlu C.

11th International Conference on Recent Advances in Air and Space Technologies, Conference Program, RAST 2026, İstanbul, Türkiye, 13 - 15 Mayıs 2026, (Tam Metin Bildiri)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1109/rast69551.2026.11672366
  • Basıldığı Şehir: İstanbul
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: flight dynamics, high-performance computing, multi-agent systems, OpenMP, parallel simulation, UAV swarms
  • Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Large scale UAV swarm systems require efficient simulation environments to evaluate flight dynamics before real world simulation. However, the use of realistic dynamic models for simulating large numbers of UAV agents results in high computational costs and limits scalability. This paper presents a scalable and performance oriented UAV swarm simulation framework designed for large scale multi agent flight dynamics evaluation. The proposed simulator integrates a compiled MATLAB/Simulink six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) quadrotor dynamics model into a C++ host application capable of managing multiple UAV instances at a fixed control frequency. To improve computational efficiency, the per-UAV simulation loop is parallelized using OpenMP while preserving deterministic execution through controlled scheduling. Furthermore, a numerical verification mechanism is introduced to evaluate the consistency between serial and parallel executions under a strict tolerance threshold. Experimental results for a benchmark scenario involving 100 UAVs operating at 200 Hz for 60 seconds demonstrate that the proposed parallel framework reduces the average runtime from 3.9765 sec to 0.5885 sec when executed with 16 threads, achieving a speedup of 6.76 times compared to the serial implementation while maintaining numerical correctness. These results indicate that the proposed framework provides an efficient, scalable, and reliable platform for high-density UAV swarm simulation and performance evaluation.