As the United States National Airspace System (US NAS or simply NAS) has become stressed, the need for careful design and coordination of traffic management capabilities at both short (0-2 hour) and longer (2-24 hour) time horizons has increased. In the current NAS, design and coordination of flow-management capabilities is largely experience-driven. Traffic-management personnel at the ARTCCs and ATCSCC, along with airline personnel, engage in dialog to decide on a traffic management plan; with limited forecast and decision-support tools available, these personnel often lean on past experience to develop the plans. The increasing stress on NAS resources dictates, however, that flow-management design and coordination capabilities are needed over longer temporal and spatial horizons. The much higher complexity of such design and coordination tasks, along with the significant uncertainty in weather and traffic at this scale, limits the efficacy of experience-driven designs: these designs are wont to be overly conservative (imposing greater delay than is needed to prevent capacity excess with high probability), and at times may miss important components in a good management scheme.
展开▼
