Evaluation of the national airspace system aggregate performance sensitivity

Abstract

This paper describes research involving advanced traffic flow management concepts and solutions in the national airspace system. We summarize our tools and methods, and describe NAS performance metrics and sensitivities. Our results indicate that in addition traffic volume and delay, congestion is an important NAS performance metric. Our results also show that NAS performance is highly sensitive to the degree of delay distribution in the TFM solution. NAS performance is also sensitive to the agility of the TFM system. Finally, NAS performance is only slightly sensitive to forecasting improvements of traffic loading and weather.

The Value of Reduced Uncertainty in Air Traffic Flow Management

“…There are several aspects to solving flow management problems, including capacity estimation, demand estimation, and actual methods for modeling and solving the problem of demand-capacity imbalances. This work is concerned with demand and capacity uncertainty and its effects on the National Airspace System, which is explicitly considered by Hunter and Ramamoorthy, 1 Masalonis, et al, 2 and Zobell. 3 Masalonis's and Zobell's works focus on the presentation of uncertain data to traffic flow managers and how they might use such data, which is not a focus on the research presented here.…”