Integrated Demand Management: Coordinating Strategic and Tactical Flow Scheduling Operations

Abstract

In recent years, NASA has initiated the development of a focused near-to mid-term concept called "Integrated Demand Management" (IDM) under the Airspace Operations and Safety Program (AOSP). The focus of the research has been to develop more powerful, integrated operations and tools for managing trajectory constraints, leveraging existing systems and adding new automation tools and methods where needed. The IDM concept is predicated on the idea that in situations where the capacity of critical resources (such as airspace or airports) is insufficient to meet demand, a better match between available capacity and the predicted demand would significantly benefit the operations, with potential improvements in throughput, delays, and efficient flight trajectories. In current operations the reasons for the capacity/demand mismatches can vary, and range from problems due to structural limitations (e.g., surface capacity at high-volume airports, high-complexity en route or arrival airspace); to wind-related capacity changes; to the more severe, unstable and dynamic mismatches that occur with convective weather. The IDM solution proposes to address the demand / capacity mismatches by using the strategic flow management capabilities within the traffic flow management system (TFMS) toolset to "pre-condition" demand into the more tactical time-based flow management (TBFM) system, which should enable TBFM to better manage delivery to the capacity-constrained resource(s). The intent of IDM is to leverage the strengths of each of these systems to produce an integrated solution that is more powerful and robust than either could provide alone, or than the two would provide today as uncoordinated systems.Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) was chosen to be the focus of our initial design problem for several reasons. EWR routinely sees scheduled demand at or near airport capacity through much of the day with a varying mix of short-haul and long-haul flights. Although this is usually managed effectively using miles-in-trail and TBFM metering, close-in departures can experience excessive and unpredictable ground delay if the overhead flow is saturated. In the initial development of IDM concept, an alternative solution to this volume problem was proposed that integrates 3 key capabilities: 1) Collaborative Trajectory Options Program (CTOP) capability within TFMS to issue traffic management initiatives that can "strategically" manage demand into the TBFM system; 2) TBFM capability closer to the destination airport to "tactically" manage delivery to the capacity-constrained destination; and 3) required-time-of-arrival (RTA) capability on the flight deck to provide a more controlled traffic demand using the CTOP derived schedule into the TBFM domain.The IDM concept development is ongoing and iterative, based on inputs from the FAA and airline stakeholders, as well as on insights gained from a series of human-in-the-loop

Automated Scenario Generation for Meeting Human-in-the-Loop Simulation Requirements

“…MACS is a distributed simulation system with multiple pseudo-pilot and air traffic controller stations that is frequently used for National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s evaluations of air traffic management concepts. 1 Automated scenario generation has been used for creating MACS scenarios for Dynamic Routes for Arrivals in Weather (DRAW) 2 and Integrated Demand Management 3 HITL experiments. It has also been used for creating Airspace Target Generator (ATG) scenarios, used in realistic airport surface traffic simulation, for the Airspace Technology Demonstration (ATD-2) 4 subproject.…”

Using an Automated Air Traffic Simulation Capability for a Parametric Study in Traffic Flow Management

“…A wide variety of open questions exist addressing benefits of airline participation in CTOP and sensitivity of TBFM airborne delay to various sources of uncertainty. A number of human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulation studies have been carried out with experienced air traffic manager and controller participants 1,2 to better understand the interaction of CTOP and TBFM. While these experiments have produced important results, the resources and time required to conduct real-time studies with human participants limits the number of HITL simulations that can be conducted and thus the number of experimental conditions that can be tested.…”

“…Integrated Demand Management (IDM) is a NASA concept that aims to integrate and coordinate demand management across these systems to work together more effectively. 1 Within the IDM concept framework, the strategic system may redistribute demand from an overloaded resource to one with reserve capacity, or allocate predeparture delay so that it is calibrated to variations in demand, and better matched to the demand that the tactical system can accommodate. This should allow the strategic system to manage delivery to the capacity-constrained destination more efficiently.…”

“…For tactical flow management, TBFM is an arrival scheduling tool that was developed to improve traffic delivery into capacity-constrained airports or airspace resources. 1,6 As described in Ref. 3, TBFM is generally used to schedule flights arriving into a constrained airspace or airport.…”

“…3. An emulation of CTOP, called nCTOP (NASA CTOP) 1 and constructed for the HITL simulations, was used to emulate the key functions of the operational CTOP system. nCTOP contains some added functionality from the original CTOP concept that may be introduced in the operational system in the future.…”