Collaborative Trajectory Options Program (CTOP) is an FAA traffic management initiative that can control traffic over multiple airspace or airport resources. One of the key attributes of CTOP is the application of trajectory options sets (TOSs), in which participating air carriers can specify their preferences for rerouting options. Preferences are stated via relative trajectory costs (RTCs). For a given flight, the air carrier submits one RTC value for each alternate route in the flight's TOS. The CTOP resource allocation algorithm uses the RTC values to infer which route the air carrier would like the flight to take, given the amount of ground delay it would receive on each of the routes. In this paper, we provide examples of flight cost functions and methods an air carrier could use to generate the RTCs. We pose this RTC-setting problem as a mathematical formulation, and we show that even for simplified cost functions, the current language air carriers are required to use for communicating RTCs leads to suboptimal results. We propose a new language that air carriers could use to express routing preferences that allows them to more accurately express routing costs and alleviate the need to solve a mathematical problem. Also, we provide an approximation method for solving the RTC-setting problem, which should give satisfactory results while the new language is being considered for adoption.
展开▼
