FACET: Future ATM Concepts Evaluation Tool

Bilmoria, Karl D.; Sridhar, Banavar; Chatterji, Gano B.; Sheth, Kapil; Grabbe, Shon

doi:10.2514/atcq.9.1.1

Cited by 257 publications

(185 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(7 reference statements)

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“…FACET (Future ATM Concepts Evaluation Tool), a physics based model of the US airspace was developed to accurately model the complex air traffic flow problem [10]. It is based on propagating the trajectories of proposed flights forward in time.…”

Section: Facetmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is based on propagating the trajectories of proposed flights forward in time. FACET can be used to either simulate and display air traffic (a 24 hour slice with 60,000 flights takes 15 minutes to simulate on a 3 GHz, 1 GB RAM computer) or provide rapid statistics on recorded data (4D trajectories for 10,000 flights including sectors, airports, and fix statistics in 10 seconds on the same computer) [10,40].…”

Section: Facetmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A multiagent approach to managing air traffic flow

Agogino

Tumer

2010

Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst

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Abstract. Intelligent air traffic flow management is one of the fundamental challenges facing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today. FAA estimates put weather, routing decisions and airport condition induced delays at 1,682,700 hours in 2007 [18], resulting in a staggering economic loss of over $41 Billion [42]. New solutions to the flow management are needed to accommodate the threefold increase in air traffic anticipated over the next two decades. Indeed, this is a complex problem where the interactions of changing conditions (e.g., weather), conflicting priorities (e.g., different airlines), limited resources (e.g., air traffic controllers) and heavy volume (e.g., over 40,000 flights over the US airspace) demand an adaptive and robust solution.In this paper we explore a multiagent algorithm where agents use reinforcement learning to reduce congestion through local actions. Each agent is associated with a fix (a specific location in 2D space) and has one of three actions: setting separation between airplanes, ordering ground delays or performing reroutes. We simulate air traffic using FACET which is an air traffic flow simulator developed at NASA and used extensively by the FAA and industry. Our FACET simulations on both artificial and real historical data from the Chicago and New York airspaces show that agents receiving personalized rewards reduce congestion by up to 80% over agents receiving a global reward and by up to 90% over a current industry approach (Monte Carlo estimation).

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Section: Facetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Facetmentioning

confidence: 99%

A multiagent approach to managing air traffic flow

Agogino

Tumer

2010

Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst

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“…The experiment was conducted using the Future ATM Concept Evaluation Tool (FACET) [7]. The tool has been used in previous studies [3], [5], [8], [9] to evaluate new Traffic Flow Management (TFM) concepts in the NAS.…”

Section: Methods and Design Of The Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Future ATM Concept Evaluation Tool (FACET 1 ) [7] was used for this experiment. The input data consisted of 65,173 flights in the US including domestic and international traffic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of stakeholder benefits of NextGen Trajectory-Based Operations

Calderon-Meza

Sherry

2010

2010 Integrated Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance Conference Proceedings

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Abstract-Trajectory-Based Operations is a NextGen initiative that seeks to increase the effective-capacity of the National Airspace System by adding flexibility to the 4-D trajectories as flights traverse airspace. More flexible trajectories can minimize the airlines operating costs (i.e., distance flown), shift the geography of Air Traffic Control (ATC) workload (i.e., sectors used), shift the time-intensity of ATC workload (i.e., flights counts per sector), and reduce congestion in the destination airports.This paper describes the results of an analysis of one day of operations, including domestic and international flights, in the NAS using traditional navigation aid-based airway routes compared to direct, i.e., Great Circle Distance, routes. Apart from the total of 1,608,751 nm (average 24.7 nm per flight) savings in distance flown generated by flying Great Circle Distance Routes, the results show: (i) a redistribution of flights across sectors resulting in a reduction of 3% in the total time the flights in a sector are in excess of the Monitor Alert Parameters for that sector, (ii) a reduction in ATC workload reflected by a 42% drop in the number of flights requiring conflict resolution, (iii) the average ground delay due to the natural limits in the arrival capacity of the OEP-35 airports increases when using direct routes, but the increase is small, (iv) the congestion at the destination airports remains the same. These results indicate the upper bound of benefit opportunities for both ATC and the airlines based on the introduction of flexible routing structures in NextGen, but no improvement for the airports in terms of congestion.

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“…al, 2001;. 23,24 The FAA used FACET in human-in-the-loop simulations to refine the Airspace Flow Program concept. Today, the FAA's reroute conformance monitoring function employs FACET to evaluate how well aircraft are following national traffic management initiatives.…”

Section: Future Atm Concepts Evaluation Tool (Facet)mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Perspective on NASA Ames Air Traffic Management Research

Schroeder

2009

9th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations Conference (ATIO)

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This paper describes past and present air-traffic-management research at NASA Ames Research Center. The descriptions emerge from the perspective of a technical manager who supervised the majority of this research for the last four years. Past research contributions built a foundation for calculating accurate flight trajectories to enable efficient airspace management in time. That foundation led to two predominant research activities that continue to this day -one in automatically separating aircraft and the other in optimizing traffic flows. Today's national airspace uses many of the applications resulting from research at Ames. These applications include the nationwide deployment of the Traffic Management Advisor, new procedures enabling continuous descent arrivals, cooperation with industry to permit more direct flights to downstream waypoints, a surface management system in use by two cargo carriers, and software to evaluate how well flights conform to national traffic management initiatives. The paper concludes with suggestions for prioritized research in the upcoming years. These priorities include: enabling more firstlook operational evaluations, improving conflict detection and resolution for climbing or descending aircraft, and focusing additional attention on the underpinning safety critical items such as a reliable datalink.

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FACET: Future ATM Concepts Evaluation Tool

Cited by 257 publications

References 10 publications

A multiagent approach to managing air traffic flow

A multiagent approach to managing air traffic flow

Analysis of stakeholder benefits of NextGen Trajectory-Based Operations

A Perspective on NASA Ames Air Traffic Management Research

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