We present a strongly hyperbolic first-order formulation of the Einstein equations based on the conformal and covariant Z4 system (CCZ4) with constraint-violation damping, which we refer to as FO-CCZ4. As CCZ4, this formulation combines the advantages of a conformal and traceless formulation, with the suppression of constraint violations given by the damping terms, but being first order in time and space, it is particularly suited for a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) implementation. The strongly hyperbolic first-order formulation has been obtained by making careful use of first and second-order ordering constraints. A proof of strong hyperbolicity is given for a selected choice of standard gauges via an analytical computation of the entire eigenstructure of the FO-CCZ4 system. The resulting governing partial differential equations system is written in non-conservative form and requires the evolution of 58 unknowns. A key feature of our formulation is that the first-order CCZ4 system decouples into a set of pure ordinary differential equations and a reduced hyperbolic system of partial differential equations that contains only linearly degenerate fields. We implement FO-CCZ4 in a high-order path-conservative arbitrary-high-order-method-using-derivatives (ADER)-DG scheme with adaptive mesh refinement and local time-stepping, supplemented with a third-order ADER-WENO subcell finite-volume limiter in order to deal with singularities arising with black holes. We validate the correctness of the formulation through a series of standard tests in vacuum, performed in one, two and three spatial dimensions, and also present preliminary results on the evolution of binary black-hole systems. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first successful three-dimensional simulations of moving punctures carried out with high-order DG schemes using a first-order formulation of the Einstein equations.
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