Integration of Traffic Flow Management Decisions

Sridhar, Banavar; Chatterji, Gano B.; Grabbe, Shon; Sheth, Kapil

doi:10.2514/6.2002-5014

Cited by 49 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Airspace capacity in the absence of weather is limited mostly by air traffic controller workload considerations. When traffic demand is expected to exceed capacity, traffic flow management techniques, [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] such as delaying fights on the ground, spacing them in the air and changing their routes of flight, are used to curtail demand. The delays cost the airlines and the flying public.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interaction of Airspace Partitions and Traffic Flow Management Delay

Palopo

Chatterji

Lee

2010

10th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conference

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To ensure that air traffic demand does not exceed airport and airspace capacities, traffic management restrictions, such as delaying aircraft on the ground, assigning them different routes and metering them in the airspace, are implemented. To reduce the delays resulting from these restrictions, revising the partitioning of airspace has been proposed to distribute capacity to yield a more efficient airspace configuration. The capacity of an airspace partition, commonly referred to as a sector, is limited by the number of flights that an air traffic controller can safely manage within the sector. Where viable, re-partitioning of the airspace distributes the flights over more efficient sectors and reduces individual sector demand. This increases the overall airspace efficiency, but requires additional resources in some sectors in terms of controllers and equipment, which is undesirable. This study examines the tradeoff of the number of sectors designed for a specified amount of traffic in a clear-weather day and the delays needed for accommodating the traffic demand. Results show that most of the delays are caused by airport arrival and departure capacity constraints. Some delays caused by airspace capacity constraints can be eliminated by re-partitioning the airspace. Analyses show that about 360 high-altitude sectors, which are approximately today's operational number of sectors of 373, are adequate for delays to be driven solely by airport capacity constraints for the current daily air traffic demand. For a marginal increase of 15 seconds of average delay, the number of sectors can be reduced to 283. In addition, simulations of traffic growths of 15% and 20% with forecasted airport capacities in the years 2018 and 2025 show that delays will continue to be governed by airport capacities. In clear-weather days, for small increases in traffic demand, increasing sector capacities will have almost no effect on delays.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interaction of Airspace Partitions and Traffic Flow Management Delay

Palopo

Chatterji

Lee

2010

10th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conference

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“…The tool has been used in previous studies [3], [5], [8], [9] to evaluate new Traffic Flow Management (TFM) concepts in the NAS. FACET offers many options like the possibility connecting to real-time data sources for weather and traffic, real-time conflict detection and resolution, batch processing of input data, and a Java API 2 .…”

Section: Methods and Design Of The Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of stakeholder benefits of NextGen Trajectory-Based Operations

Calderon-Meza

Sherry

2010

2010 Integrated Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance Conference Proceedings

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Abstract-Trajectory-Based Operations is a NextGen initiative that seeks to increase the effective-capacity of the National Airspace System by adding flexibility to the 4-D trajectories as flights traverse airspace. More flexible trajectories can minimize the airlines operating costs (i.e., distance flown), shift the geography of Air Traffic Control (ATC) workload (i.e., sectors used), shift the time-intensity of ATC workload (i.e., flights counts per sector), and reduce congestion in the destination airports.This paper describes the results of an analysis of one day of operations, including domestic and international flights, in the NAS using traditional navigation aid-based airway routes compared to direct, i.e., Great Circle Distance, routes. Apart from the total of 1,608,751 nm (average 24.7 nm per flight) savings in distance flown generated by flying Great Circle Distance Routes, the results show: (i) a redistribution of flights across sectors resulting in a reduction of 3% in the total time the flights in a sector are in excess of the Monitor Alert Parameters for that sector, (ii) a reduction in ATC workload reflected by a 42% drop in the number of flights requiring conflict resolution, (iii) the average ground delay due to the natural limits in the arrival capacity of the OEP-35 airports increases when using direct routes, but the increase is small, (iv) the congestion at the destination airports remains the same. These results indicate the upper bound of benefit opportunities for both ATC and the airlines based on the introduction of flexible routing structures in NextGen, but no improvement for the airports in terms of congestion.

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“…Optimally partitioning the airspace, hereafter known as sectorization, requires a metric that quantifies controller workload. Previous research identified such a quantification, known as Dynamic Density, that includes a wide variety of air traffic and airspace metrics [1][2][3][4][5][6]. This has been narrowed to a subset of key metrics known as the Simplified Dynamic Density [7,8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of different cost functions in the Geosect airspace partitioning tool

Wong

2009

2009 IEEE/AIAA 28th Digital Avionics Systems Conference

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A new cost function representing air traffic controller workload is implemented in the Geosect airspace partitioning tool. Geosect currently uses a combination of aircraft count and dwell time to select optimal airspace partitions that balance controller workload. This is referred to as the aircraft count/dwell time hybrid cost function. The new cost function is based on Simplified Dynamic Density, a measure of different aspects of air traffic controller workload.

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Integration of Traffic Flow Management Decisions

Cited by 49 publications

References 1 publication

Interaction of Airspace Partitions and Traffic Flow Management Delay

Interaction of Airspace Partitions and Traffic Flow Management Delay

Analysis of stakeholder benefits of NextGen Trajectory-Based Operations

Analysis of different cost functions in the Geosect airspace partitioning tool

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