Airspace Operations Lab @ NASA Ames

An ongoing challenge for government agencies involved in the Federal Government's NextGen initiative is the need to estimate the potential costs and benefits of future Air Traffic Management (ATM) Concepts and Technologies (C&Ts). The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) have been involved in collaborative efforts over the past decade to define, develop, evaluate and deploy NextGen concepts, capabilities and technologies. NASA has a long history of research and development in aviation and Air Traffic Management. In particular, NASA has developed a number of ground-based and airborne decision support tools (DSTs) that support concepts and technologies such as time- based-arrival-metering and flight-deck-interval-management. In order to evaluate the potential costs/benefits of these decision support tools, modeling, simulation, and analysis techniques must be applied to represent the operational impacts of these tools. In this paper, we describe the development and application of an approach to assess the potential benefits of several NASA DSTs in terms of time and fuel savings at a number of key airports in the National Airspace System (NAS). The benefits are assessed for individual DSTs as well as for various combinations of DSTs that represent distinct applications of concepts and technologies. Results show that the potential benefits of the individual and combined DSTs are highly-dependent on the assumed implementation and deployment timeline.