Reducing Flight Delays Through Better Traffic Management

Abstract

As air traffic in the United States has grown over the last several years, traffic demand has begun to outstrip capacity. As of 2005, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had no effective approach for strategically managing a weather event that has been very disruptive to the national aviation system—large-scale thunderstorms that block the major flight routes in the northeastern United States. The operations research team that supports the FAA's efforts to provide innovations in air traffic management, led by researchers at Metron Aviation, Inc. and the Volpe Transportation Center, recognized the consequence of this operational deficiency and set out to resolve it. In this paper, we show how this team (1) developed and applied system-simulation models to quantify the extent of the traffic flow management problem and convey its magnitude to the FAA and to the aviation industry; (2) designed the Airspace Flow Program (AFP), a new approach to managing air traffic that could correct the problem within the limitations of a short development cycle and a change-resistant culture; (3) designed and developed an interactive simulation system that could be and was used to refine and perfect this concept prior to deployment by developing policies on the use of a decision support system; (4) engaged FAA and airline traffic management experts in a series of interactive exercises using the simulation system to develop the final software design, operational procedures, and decision rules for deployment and use; and (5) provided a clear and convincing postdeployment benefits assessment for the new traffic management approach. The deployment of this new capability was an enormous success that both the FAA and the airline community heralded widely. The postdeployment impact assessment showed benefits to the aircraft operators and the flying public of almost $190 million in 2006 and 2007, the first two years of use, compared to less than $5 million in design and development costs. Broader usage of AFPs and new applications for them show a projected 10-year benefit of approximately $2.8 billion.

Economics of modeling and simulation: Reflections and implications for healthcare

“…The evidence is more based in manufacturing (around 36%), defense (around 29%), transportation (around 7%), and other sectors (28%). As mentioned earlier, there is little evidence on cost-effectiveness cases as most articles report on benefits only (Manzini et al, 2005;Sud et al, 2009;Hueter and Swart, 1998;Worley et al, 1996;and Gordon et al, 2005). While costs range from around $30k (Engelstein 2007) up to $20m (Gordon et al 2005) (representing military acquisition programs), benefits are varied between $400k per year (CACI 2010) and $750m in a single year (Lin et al 2000).…”

“…While costs range from around $30k (Engelstein 2007) up to $20m (Gordon et al 2005) (representing military acquisition programs), benefits are varied between $400k per year (CACI 2010) and $750m in a single year (Lin et al 2000). The benefit/cost ratios reported in literature have been in the scale of 3-to-1 (Manzini et al 2005) up to 560-to-1 (Sud et al 2009). As one would expect, there is a great deal of variance as problems vary in size and resulting benefits vary in impact.…”

From data to complex network control of airline flight delays

“…Many techniques to model the mechanisms of flight delays employ direct acyclic graphs 28 , propagation trees 29 , Bayesian networks 20 , 22 ot network-epidemic processes 30 , 31 . As for the mitigation strategies, with the exception of the traditional traffic management 32 , so far no effective and practical strategy has been found. There are some valuable discussions about renting spare aircraft to prevent and recover from schedule disruptions in 33 , 34 .…”