The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Traffic Flow Management System (TFMS) currently declares an alert for any 15-minute interval in which the predicted demand exceeds the Monitor/Alert Parameter (MAP) for any airport, sector, or fix. For airports and fixes traffic demand is measured by aggregate 15-minute counts. For a sector, however, TFMS predicts the demand for each minute, and then uses the demand of the peak minute in a 15-minute interval to decide whether to declare an alert for the entire 15-minute interval. Using the peak demand from a single minute to declare alerts has been criticized by TFM specialists for three reasons. First, the demand from a single minute does not accurately reflect the workload for the entire 15-minute interval. Second, using demand for a single minute leads to instability; that is, slight fluctuations in demand from minute to minute can lead to alerts flickering on and off. Third, the interval that is alerted depends on arbitrary 15-minute boundaries. To deal with these problems with the current method of declaring alerts, we propose a new method of declaring sector alerts that is based on the patterns of one-minute demands and that matches more closely the intuition of traffic managers about what more likely represents a potential problem.
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