How the System Wide Evaluation and Planning Tool (SWEPT) can support Air Traffic Management Decision-Making in the Eastern U.S.

摘要

The NASA Strategic Airspace Usage (SAU) Project is maturing the System-Wide Evaluation and Planning Tool (SWEPT). SWEPT is a Traffic Flow Management (TFM) decision support tool that can be used for real-time decision-making or post-operations analysis at either a national or a regional level. For each active and proposed aircraft in the National Airspace System (NAS), the SWEPT trajectory prediction module computes the predicted demand at sectors, fixes and airports. Graphical displays are available in SWEPT, which quickly identify NAS resources that are over-utilized. SWEPT uses many of the software modules developed for the NASA Future ATM Concepts Evaluation Tool (FACET) (see Bilimoria et. al. (2001)). Under the NASA Advanced Air Transportation Technologies (AATT) Project, initial rerouting, Miles-in-Trail (MIT) and Ground Delay Program (GDP) algorithms were developed in SWEPT that can be used in conjunction with the trajectory prediction module to rapidly access the impact of a TFM restriction prior to implementation (see Grabbe and Sridhar (2003)). This capability will allow Traffic Management Specialists to determine the effectiveness of various TFM initiatives.