Network-Wide Resilience Metric to Enhance Traffic Flow Management Decision-Making

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) manages demand/capacity imbalances in the National Airspace System (NAS) through Traffic Flow Management (TFM) actions such as Ground Delay Programs, Airspace Flow Programs, and Ground Stops. Current decision-support tools assist Traffic Managers in evaluating the effects of such TFM actions; however, these impacts are often assessed on a localized or regional level (e.g., New York airports). This work aims to develop an aggregate NAS-wide network model—the NAS Network Model—and accompanying resilience metric, which could support traffic managers in quantitatively evaluating TFM strategies from a NAS-wide perspective. The proposed resilience metric described in this paper includes delay magnitudes at network nodes (i.e., airports), the efficient use of capacity at network nodes, and delay dynamics (i.e., the “busyness” of different nodes in the network). We demonstrated how the NAS Network Model and resilience metric may be applied using four historical traffic scenarios to predict a future NAS state given the application of different modes representing TFM actions. After describing how the NAS Network Model can be parameterized with historical NAS data, we detail a prototype software capability that shows how real-time NAS data may be integrated with the NAS Network Model to predict future delay states and to generate the resilience metric.