Evolution Toward a Decentralized Air Traffic Flow Management System

摘要

There are three major components of the work reported here. The first is the development of alternative Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) concepts ranging from centralized to decentralized. The second is the development of metrics and tools to be employed in the analysis of alternative ATFM concepts that are in this range. The third is the application of these tools and metrics in the analysis of three ATFM operational concepts: passive, current, and collaborative. Passive refers to no ATFM and is used as a baseline; current is the currently employed approach to ATFM; and collaborative refers to a hypothesized ATFM concept that is more decentralized than current ATFM and is a concept in which the FAA allocates a set of arrival slots for each airline and each airline individually determines the assignment of each of its particular aircraft to each slot in its allocated set of slots. Two classes of capacity scenarios are used. The first is a case for which there is VMC throughout the system. The second represents the case of a weather front moving up the east coast, causing IMC for several hours (with uncertain start times) at key airports. Cases with and without en route free flight (User Preferred Routing) and CTAS are modeled. Appropriate metrics (e.g., delay, tardiness) for each of the operational and capacity scenarios have been calculated and are presented.