Integration of new flight operations, such as urban air mobility vehicles and commercial space fl... more Integration of new flight operations, such as urban air mobility vehicles and commercial space flights, into the National Airspace System (NAS) will require accommodation of new vehicles with different performance and mission profiles into an established traditional commercial and general aviation aircraft operational framework. For example, in this increasingly diverse future air traffic operations, the interaction and integration of on-demand operations with traditional, largely scheduled operations will lead them to share existing commercial airspace with increased requirements on data exchange and control schemes to ensure adequate safety margins. In this new paradigm, the traditional operations will need to transform from current vector-based operation to a more integrated trajectory-based operation (TBO) in which the aircraft's trajectory intents are more strategically planned, precisely tracked, and collaboratively coordinated. Over the years, NASA has been developing, demonstrating and transferring air traffic management concepts to the FAA to support surface, departure and arrival metering, as well as dynamic reroutes for weather avoidance. This paper describes a framework for combining and advancing those NASA efforts to improve arrival and departure demand management by integrating select NASA TBO capabilities with the Traffic Flow Management System (TFMS), Time-Based Flow Management (TBFM), and the Terminal Flight Data Manager (TFDM) tools to enable TBO across the NAS. The overall concept incorporates operator priorities and preferences in a service-oriented approach to managing complex, high demand airports.
2019 IEEE/AIAA 38th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), 2019
Integration of new flight operations, such as urban air mobility vehicles and commercial space fl... more Integration of new flight operations, such as urban air mobility vehicles and commercial space flights, into the National Airspace System (NAS) will require accommodation of new vehicles with different performance and mission profiles into an established traditional commercial and general aviation aircraft operational framework. For example, in this increasingly diverse future air traffic operations, the interaction and integration of on-demand operations with traditional, largely scheduled operations will lead them to share existing commercial airspace with increased requirements on data exchange and control schemes to ensure adequate safety margins. In this new paradigm, the traditional operations will need to transform from current vector-based operation to a more integrated trajectory-based operation (TBO) in which the aircraft's trajectory intents are more strategically planned, precisely tracked, and collaboratively coordinated. Over the years, NASA has been developing, demonstrating and transferring air traffic management concepts to the FAA to support surface, departure and arrival metering, as well as dynamic reroutes for weather avoidance. This paper describes a framework for combining and advancing those NASA efforts to improve arrival and departure demand management by integrating select NASA TBO capabilities with the Traffic Flow Management System (TFMS), Time-Based Flow Management (TBFM), and the Terminal Flight Data Manager (TFDM) tools to enable TBO across the NAS. The overall concept incorporates operator priorities and preferences in a service-oriented approach to managing complex, high demand airports.
The growing demand for air travel is increasing the need for mitigation of air traffic congestion... more The growing demand for air travel is increasing the need for mitigation of air traffic congestion and complexity problems, which are already at high levels. At the same time new information and automation technologies are enabling the distribution of tasks and decisions from the service providers to the users of the air traffic system, with potential capacity and cost benefits. This distribution of tasks and decisions raises the concern that independent user actions will decrease the predictability and increase the complexity of the traffic system, hence inhibiting and possibly reversing any potential benefits. In answer to this concern, the authors propose the introduction of decision-making metrics for preserving user trajectory flexibility. The hypothesis is that such metrics will make user actions naturally mitigate traffic complexity. In this paper, the impact of using these metrics on traffic complexity is investigated. The scenarios analyzed include aircraft in en route airsp...
The air traffic management system lacks integration among its elements often due to using inconsi... more The air traffic management system lacks integration among its elements often due to using inconsistent information, models, and metrics about the traffic. Transitioning to trajectorybased operations, whereby flights are managed by full trajectories in space and time, will enable more integration, with the help of increased automation. Building on trajectory-based operations, an “accrued delay” metric is proposed, which continuously measures the amount of delay that a flight has accumulated up to the current time, including delays incurred during the current flight and inherited from previous flights through the turnaround process. Through a time-based metering and scheduling example, we show how using accrued delay as a metric can help integrate the decision-making across multiple decision horizons, leading to more efficient and balanced access to airspace services. We show that when prioritizing flights that have already accrued high delay because of a constrained runway resource, ...
NASA developed the traffic aware strategic aircrew requests concept for a cockpit automation that... more NASA developed the traffic aware strategic aircrew requests concept for a cockpit automation that identifies route improvements and advises the aircrew to request the change from the air traffic controller. In order to increase the chance of air traffic control approval, the automation ensures that the route is clear of known traffic, weather, and airspace restrictions. Hence the technology is anticipated to provide benefits in areas such as flight efficiency, flight schedule compliance, passenger comfort, and pilot and controller workload. In support of a field trial of a prototype of the technology, observations were conducted at the Atlanta and Jacksonville air traffic control centers to identify the main factors that affect the acceptability of aircrew requests by air traffic controllers. Observers shadowed air traffic controllers as the test flight pilot made pre-scripted requests to invoke acceptability issues and then they interviewed voluntarily fifty controllers with experi...
This paper presents a distributed, trajectory-oriented approach to managing traffic complexity ap... more This paper presents a distributed, trajectory-oriented approach to managing traffic complexity applicable to self-separation operations. Aircraft trajectory-based operations are one of three key transformation in Air Traffic Management (ATM) necessary under the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) to handle the expected increase in air traffic. The research presented here is in support of the Autonomous Operation Planner (AOP), a NASA-developed research model of an airborne automation system built for the study of advanced distributed air-ground operational concepts. The premise of the distributed control architecture is to mitigate the controller workload as a constraint against increasing airspace capacity and to increase the capacity for separation assurance through pilots’ participation. The capacity for separation assurance is expected to increase as the traffic increases because that will introduce more pilot decision-makers for self-separating aircraft and thus adds scalability of capacity with demand. This paper presents preliminary research investigating two distributed functions that have been newly proposed, which provide long-horizon planning, thus preventing the emergence of complex traffic situations: a trajectory flexibility preservation function and a trajectory constraint minimization function. A trajectory flexibility preservation function allows the aircraft to preserve options to accommodate disturbances from factors such as other traffic or weather. The constraint minimization function enables ground-based agents in collaboration with air-based agents to impose just enough constraints to achieve separation assurance and flow management. The paper uses a simple scenario with couple aircraft due to the stage of the research, starting with anecdotal insight before moving to statistical inference in complicated situations. The example provides initial insights into the hypothesized impact on traffic complexity. It demonstrates that preserving flexibility may result in mitigating certain factors that contribute to traffic complexity.
Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference and Exhibit, 1998
A new approach to the planning and control of the traffic in the terminal area is proposed. The a... more A new approach to the planning and control of the traffic in the terminal area is proposed. The approach combines the path generation and the conflict avoidance problems into one problem. The objective is to generate conflict-free paths for all aircraft in the terminal area to meet the given landing schedule at the runway. It is assumed that the given schedule guarantees the existence of such conflict-free paths, otherwise, the schedule needs to be revised accordingly. This paper presents the concept geometrically, and results in an algorithm which generates conflictfree paths for all aircraft simultaneously.
International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, 1998
This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time simulation of aircraft motion o... more This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time simulation of aircraft motion on the ground at airports. The aircraft Ground Motion Simulator (GMS) is designed to realistically simulate tower, ground, and apron aircraft control. The simulation includes high-fidelity graphic views, in color, of airport ground activity. It simulates air traffic operations in real time for all stages of
6th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration and Operations Conference (ATIO), 2006
*† ‡ § ** †† This study qualitatively identified the benefit mechanisms of an operational concept... more *† ‡ § ** †† This study qualitatively identified the benefit mechanisms of an operational concept for enhanced collaboration in traffic flow management. The operational concept applies to the management of traffic within the airspace controlled by the Traffic Management Unit of an Air Route Traffic Control Center. The operational concept enhances the collaboration between traffic managers and airspace users (such as airlines) for mitigating the impact of local constraints such as convective weather, Special Use Airspace activity, and airspace congestion, and for facilitating user-preferred arrival metering. It is limited to a tactical time horizon up to two hours. A formal approach for the derivation and presentation of benefit mechanisms was followed. It ensures a consistent and comprehensive analysis and provides a visualization and communication tool that guides further research and development of the concept of operation. The approach maps key functions of the operational concept to technical benefits, and then to economic benefits, through causal links which constitute benefit mechanisms. Key operational elements that enable the benefit mechanisms and affect the resulting benefits value were also identified. This preliminary analysis forms the basis for future quantitative benefits assessments, which involve modeling the benefit mechanisms and associated operational elements presented in this paper.
Integration of new flight operations, such as urban air mobility vehicles and commercial space fl... more Integration of new flight operations, such as urban air mobility vehicles and commercial space flights, into the National Airspace System (NAS) will require accommodation of new vehicles with different performance and mission profiles into an established traditional commercial and general aviation aircraft operational framework. For example, in this increasingly diverse future air traffic operations, the interaction and integration of on-demand operations with traditional, largely scheduled operations will lead them to share existing commercial airspace with increased requirements on data exchange and control schemes to ensure adequate safety margins. In this new paradigm, the traditional operations will need to transform from current vector-based operation to a more integrated trajectory-based operation (TBO) in which the aircraft's trajectory intents are more strategically planned, precisely tracked, and collaboratively coordinated. Over the years, NASA has been developing, demonstrating and transferring air traffic management concepts to the FAA to support surface, departure and arrival metering, as well as dynamic reroutes for weather avoidance. This paper describes a framework for combining and advancing those NASA efforts to improve arrival and departure demand management by integrating select NASA TBO capabilities with the Traffic Flow Management System (TFMS), Time-Based Flow Management (TBFM), and the Terminal Flight Data Manager (TFDM) tools to enable TBO across the NAS. The overall concept incorporates operator priorities and preferences in a service-oriented approach to managing complex, high demand airports.
2019 IEEE/AIAA 38th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), 2019
Integration of new flight operations, such as urban air mobility vehicles and commercial space fl... more Integration of new flight operations, such as urban air mobility vehicles and commercial space flights, into the National Airspace System (NAS) will require accommodation of new vehicles with different performance and mission profiles into an established traditional commercial and general aviation aircraft operational framework. For example, in this increasingly diverse future air traffic operations, the interaction and integration of on-demand operations with traditional, largely scheduled operations will lead them to share existing commercial airspace with increased requirements on data exchange and control schemes to ensure adequate safety margins. In this new paradigm, the traditional operations will need to transform from current vector-based operation to a more integrated trajectory-based operation (TBO) in which the aircraft's trajectory intents are more strategically planned, precisely tracked, and collaboratively coordinated. Over the years, NASA has been developing, demonstrating and transferring air traffic management concepts to the FAA to support surface, departure and arrival metering, as well as dynamic reroutes for weather avoidance. This paper describes a framework for combining and advancing those NASA efforts to improve arrival and departure demand management by integrating select NASA TBO capabilities with the Traffic Flow Management System (TFMS), Time-Based Flow Management (TBFM), and the Terminal Flight Data Manager (TFDM) tools to enable TBO across the NAS. The overall concept incorporates operator priorities and preferences in a service-oriented approach to managing complex, high demand airports.
The growing demand for air travel is increasing the need for mitigation of air traffic congestion... more The growing demand for air travel is increasing the need for mitigation of air traffic congestion and complexity problems, which are already at high levels. At the same time new information and automation technologies are enabling the distribution of tasks and decisions from the service providers to the users of the air traffic system, with potential capacity and cost benefits. This distribution of tasks and decisions raises the concern that independent user actions will decrease the predictability and increase the complexity of the traffic system, hence inhibiting and possibly reversing any potential benefits. In answer to this concern, the authors propose the introduction of decision-making metrics for preserving user trajectory flexibility. The hypothesis is that such metrics will make user actions naturally mitigate traffic complexity. In this paper, the impact of using these metrics on traffic complexity is investigated. The scenarios analyzed include aircraft in en route airsp...
The air traffic management system lacks integration among its elements often due to using inconsi... more The air traffic management system lacks integration among its elements often due to using inconsistent information, models, and metrics about the traffic. Transitioning to trajectorybased operations, whereby flights are managed by full trajectories in space and time, will enable more integration, with the help of increased automation. Building on trajectory-based operations, an “accrued delay” metric is proposed, which continuously measures the amount of delay that a flight has accumulated up to the current time, including delays incurred during the current flight and inherited from previous flights through the turnaround process. Through a time-based metering and scheduling example, we show how using accrued delay as a metric can help integrate the decision-making across multiple decision horizons, leading to more efficient and balanced access to airspace services. We show that when prioritizing flights that have already accrued high delay because of a constrained runway resource, ...
NASA developed the traffic aware strategic aircrew requests concept for a cockpit automation that... more NASA developed the traffic aware strategic aircrew requests concept for a cockpit automation that identifies route improvements and advises the aircrew to request the change from the air traffic controller. In order to increase the chance of air traffic control approval, the automation ensures that the route is clear of known traffic, weather, and airspace restrictions. Hence the technology is anticipated to provide benefits in areas such as flight efficiency, flight schedule compliance, passenger comfort, and pilot and controller workload. In support of a field trial of a prototype of the technology, observations were conducted at the Atlanta and Jacksonville air traffic control centers to identify the main factors that affect the acceptability of aircrew requests by air traffic controllers. Observers shadowed air traffic controllers as the test flight pilot made pre-scripted requests to invoke acceptability issues and then they interviewed voluntarily fifty controllers with experi...
This paper presents a distributed, trajectory-oriented approach to managing traffic complexity ap... more This paper presents a distributed, trajectory-oriented approach to managing traffic complexity applicable to self-separation operations. Aircraft trajectory-based operations are one of three key transformation in Air Traffic Management (ATM) necessary under the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) to handle the expected increase in air traffic. The research presented here is in support of the Autonomous Operation Planner (AOP), a NASA-developed research model of an airborne automation system built for the study of advanced distributed air-ground operational concepts. The premise of the distributed control architecture is to mitigate the controller workload as a constraint against increasing airspace capacity and to increase the capacity for separation assurance through pilots’ participation. The capacity for separation assurance is expected to increase as the traffic increases because that will introduce more pilot decision-makers for self-separating aircraft and thus adds scalability of capacity with demand. This paper presents preliminary research investigating two distributed functions that have been newly proposed, which provide long-horizon planning, thus preventing the emergence of complex traffic situations: a trajectory flexibility preservation function and a trajectory constraint minimization function. A trajectory flexibility preservation function allows the aircraft to preserve options to accommodate disturbances from factors such as other traffic or weather. The constraint minimization function enables ground-based agents in collaboration with air-based agents to impose just enough constraints to achieve separation assurance and flow management. The paper uses a simple scenario with couple aircraft due to the stage of the research, starting with anecdotal insight before moving to statistical inference in complicated situations. The example provides initial insights into the hypothesized impact on traffic complexity. It demonstrates that preserving flexibility may result in mitigating certain factors that contribute to traffic complexity.
Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference and Exhibit, 1998
A new approach to the planning and control of the traffic in the terminal area is proposed. The a... more A new approach to the planning and control of the traffic in the terminal area is proposed. The approach combines the path generation and the conflict avoidance problems into one problem. The objective is to generate conflict-free paths for all aircraft in the terminal area to meet the given landing schedule at the runway. It is assumed that the given schedule guarantees the existence of such conflict-free paths, otherwise, the schedule needs to be revised accordingly. This paper presents the concept geometrically, and results in an algorithm which generates conflictfree paths for all aircraft simultaneously.
International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, 1998
This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time simulation of aircraft motion o... more This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time simulation of aircraft motion on the ground at airports. The aircraft Ground Motion Simulator (GMS) is designed to realistically simulate tower, ground, and apron aircraft control. The simulation includes high-fidelity graphic views, in color, of airport ground activity. It simulates air traffic operations in real time for all stages of
6th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration and Operations Conference (ATIO), 2006
*† ‡ § ** †† This study qualitatively identified the benefit mechanisms of an operational concept... more *† ‡ § ** †† This study qualitatively identified the benefit mechanisms of an operational concept for enhanced collaboration in traffic flow management. The operational concept applies to the management of traffic within the airspace controlled by the Traffic Management Unit of an Air Route Traffic Control Center. The operational concept enhances the collaboration between traffic managers and airspace users (such as airlines) for mitigating the impact of local constraints such as convective weather, Special Use Airspace activity, and airspace congestion, and for facilitating user-preferred arrival metering. It is limited to a tactical time horizon up to two hours. A formal approach for the derivation and presentation of benefit mechanisms was followed. It ensures a consistent and comprehensive analysis and provides a visualization and communication tool that guides further research and development of the concept of operation. The approach maps key functions of the operational concept to technical benefits, and then to economic benefits, through causal links which constitute benefit mechanisms. Key operational elements that enable the benefit mechanisms and affect the resulting benefits value were also identified. This preliminary analysis forms the basis for future quantitative benefits assessments, which involve modeling the benefit mechanisms and associated operational elements presented in this paper.
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