Reducing Flight Delays Through Better Traffic Management

摘要

As air traffic in the United States has grown over the last several years, traffic demand has begun to outstrip capacity. As of 2005, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had no effective approach for strategically managing a weather event that has been very disruptive to the national aviation system—large-scale thunderstorms that block the major flight routes in the northeastern United States. The operations research team that supports the FAA's efforts to provide innovations in air traffic management, led by researchers at Metron Aviation, Inc. and the Volpe Transportation Center, recognized the consequence of this operational deficiency and set out to resolve it. In this paper, we show how this team