A method to design a tie-point-based optimized profile descent (OPD) solution

Abstract

Air Traffic Management (ATM) related inefficiencies are causing important unnecessary expenses to airlines around the world. The long-term ATM paradigm shift led by SESAR and NextGen will require years and important investments before it brings its long-awaited benefits.New arrival and departure management tools, new systems to manage and share air-traffic-related information or innovations in the traffic flow management systems are some of the elements of the new system. While these future tools and concepts are under development, important efficiency improvements can be addressed in the short term with today's ATM paradigm and systems simply by introducing small changes in current practices or airspace designs.Boeing's fast-time air traffic simulation tool ELASTic (Enterprise Library for Analysis and Simulation of Trajectories and Traffic) was used to conduct the fast-time simulation experiments in this paper. The tool was set up to have a good representation of the tie-point-based ATC function, and is equipped with validated aircraft performance and FMS models, as well as four-dimensional wind and temperature fields and their uncertainties.