This work is central to NASA's mission to understand and to improve the safety and efficiency of the National Airspace System (NAS). Flow management is critical to maintaining the safety of the NAS, but when overdone results in large but unquantified costs to the system. The results of this work would lead to metrics that would quantify the costs and risks in the NAS due to overly or insufficiently restrictive flow management. The main product to be used by NASA from this research will be a system to measure these inefficiencies in flow management actions taken across the NAS. The quantification of the need for more research into flow management techniques, decision aids, and related systems will be greatly improved by the product of the proposed research. Further, the design of solutions to the flow management problems identified will be guided by the product's findings. The proposed product would allow NASA to understand not only how great the inefficiencies in the real world are, but it would also be embeddable in simulation tools such as SMART-NAS for measurement of the inefficiencies of proposed improvements to the NAS. Without a solid understanding of the problems inherent in the operation of the NAS, it is very difficult to identify solutions that need to be developed. The product to be developed from this research will provide NASA a clear understanding of the problems, which will point the way to effective solutions needed to further NASA's objectives.
The two anticipated non-NASA commercial applications are applications for ANSP's such as the FAA, and applications for airspace users such as major commercial airlines. Both applications are anticipated to help the customer refine their approach to flow management. Large commercial airlines that dominate operations at an airport at times run ground delay programs on their own to avoid the need for an ANSP-run GDP. UPS and others have experimented with more tactical flow management as well, such as by coordinating airspeeds and spacing to try to deliver an efficient flow of aircraft to the destination while minimizing fuel burns. In undertaking either type of flow management, the airline must weigh the tradeoffs in their decisions of when to start restrictions, when to end restrictions, the level of the restrictions, and the flights to be involved in the restrictions. ANSP's have to make the same types of decisions, but for a broader set of operators and with less detailed knowledge of each flight's operating and financial characteristics. In both cases, the ability to measure past performance is critical to improving performance in the future. The results of our proposed research will be applicable to helping both types of organizations to improve flow management decisions.
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