Quantifying Desirable Air Route Attributes for a Reroute Generation Capability

Abstract

When airspace is partially or completely blocked by severe weather, a major challenge for airspace managers and users is the creation and selection of viable alternate routing for air traffic. Research is underway for an automated capability to help to meet this challenge. An important component of such a capability is the quantification of the attributes of operationally-acceptable routes. In this paper we describe two such quantifications, for route lateral deviation, and for flow preference.

Generating Diverse Reroutes for Tactical Constraint Avoidance

“…Drawing on previous work, this paper evaluates reroutes based on ten metrics, which are grouped into five categories for convenience. The metrics are outlined qualitatively here due to space limitations, but full detail can be found in the references [1,9,11,12]. We readily acknowledge that the metrics considered are by no means exhaustive, but posit that the groupings characterize the set of important considerations and trade-offs and as such, the value of the proposed approach can be demonstrated regardless of the specific metric calculations used.…”

Dynamically Generating Operationally Acceptable Route Alternatives Using Simulated Annealing

“…However, defining operational acceptability can be challenging. The approach described in detail in [10] involves the extraction of the essence of quality route design, as understood by subject matter experts 1 (SMEs), into quantifiable and generic evaluation metrics or constraints. The remainder of this section provides a description of the operational acceptability metrics included as evaluation criteria in this research.…”

“…As such, we define the origin-destination (O-D) flow factor of a reroute to be the sum of the O-D flow factors on each fix-pair in the reroute. The O-D flow factor for each fix-pair was derived by an analysis presented in [10] and can be summarized as follows.…”

“…To define lateral deviation mathematically, we begin by computing the maximum lateral distance, or crosstrack between the two routes. This distance is then scaled using a linear regression, described in [10], to define a zero-one scale metric where a score approaching zero is assigned to reroutes with small lateral deviations and a score approaching one is assigned to reroutes with large lateral deviations.…”

“…The research presented in this paper is part of a greater research effort to bridge this divide by defining operationallyacceptable route alternatives in real time to effectively aid decision makers in managing air traffic. The proposed approach for generating reroutes is based on the definition of route segments derived from historically-flown connections between existing fixes [9] and evaluated using metrics of operational acceptability, derived from analyses based upon subject matter expert advice [10] . Reference [9] presents a heuristic approach for generating reroutes, and details the collection requirements for these fix-pair segments as well as defines an ad-hoc method for generating reroutes.…”