NAS Element Closure Planner

This SBIR research provides a significant improvement over current-day capabilities for planning and post operations analysis of National Airspace System (NAS) closure scenarios with significant commercialization potential. The NAS Element Closure Planner (NECP) technology provides historical data analysis and what-if analysis capabilities to support data-driven planning and decision-making for NAS closures. NECP applies concepts from statistical modeling and machine learning to reliably predict likely future evolution of NAS traffic and other influencing factors over time, during airspace and airport closure events. These predictions of likely “futures” drive multiple what-if analysis simulations, each with a slightly modified initial condition, which may be defined by flight simulation start times, allocated routes, and route transit times. Multiple simulations, each driven by one unique set of initial conditions, are run for each closure option being investigated, thereby creating a distribution of performance metrics per option, which is a more realistic estimate of likely performance as opposed to a single value. This is a significant step up from the predictive analytics that are available today for closure planning related to commercial space launches as well as airport closures. Phase I and II work has developed a DST prototype for the airport closure use-case and started initial analysis of the space vehicle operations (SVO)-induced airspace closure use-case. The proposed Phase II-E efforts apply and enhance SBIR-developed data ingestion, data processing, machine learning, what-if simulation methods to support the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST)’s need for improved planning for SVO, which considers the impact on NAS users, as well as to support FAA’s Systems Analysis and Modeling Division’s needs for evaluating impacts on NAS stakeholders of SVO-induced airspace closures.

ATM-X: Provide toolset for researching constraints and stakeholder trade-offs for complex, mixed-use airspaces in support of Increasing Diverse Operations sub-project ATM-X: Support evaluation of airspace design and traffic management tool configuration tradeoffs for complex Northeast corridor region in support of Integrated Demand Management ATD-2, ATD-3: Fix closure, route closure analysis support NASA Tools: Enhance NASA tools, e.g., Flight Awareness Collaboration Tool (FACT), for analysis of space launch impacts on airline operations

FAA and International ANSPs: DST for Space Launch closure planning and post-operations analysis. Commercial Spaceport/Space Vehicles Operators: Space operations planning tool that considers and evaluates airspace and airport impacts Airlines/Airports: What-if analysis DST for responding optimally to NAS element closures on the airport surface and in the airspace

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