Traffic flow management (TFM) in the U.S. is the process by which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), with the participation of airspace users, seeks to balance the capacity of airspace and airport resources with the demand for these resources. This is a difficult process, complicated by the presence of severe weather or unusually high demand. Actions to manage demand are themselves complex, and interact in difficult-to-predict ways. Decision support tools could assist traffic managers in choosing actions to solve resource allocation problems while keeping delay at manageable levels.
Such tools must have the capability to evaluate the impact of the multiple, different flow management strategies commonly used in the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS) today. MITRE and the FAA are developing a TFM Integrated Impact Assessment (IIA) capability in which a traffic manager can specify any combination of reroutes (for avoidance of severe weather or congested airspace) and miles-in-trail (MIT) spacing restrictions. The capability predicts the sector load impact and the imposed delays due to the combined strategy, and allows the traffic manager to adjust reroute and MIT restriction parameters to improve the proposed solution.
This paper provides an introduction to the features of this capability as implemented in an experimental prototype, and a detailed report on the operational evaluation activities—including a human-in-the-loop (HITL) experiment using NAS traffic managers—that have been done to develop the concept-of-use and functional requirements for this capability. This work is in Technology Readiness Level category B, as defined in the Call For Papers for this seminar.