Alternate Route Availability Tool

The basic concept of the Alternate Route Availability Tool (ARAT) is to use available Traffic Management Initiatives (TMI) from the Digital Information Platform (DIP), correlate it with weather data, and produce a tool that can both determine if an alternate route is feasible given the constraints and assess the impact of the alternate route. Alternate routes are obtained from NFDC data, with additional logic definitions added to acquire preferred routes from the dataset. While weather information is available from many publicly available sources, Mosaic chose to use Aviation Weather Center as our weather data source due to ease of use for the data formats and already accessible application programming interfaces (APIs). The impact of alternate routes is assessed using a route scoring algorithm initially implemented as a stoplight approach in Phase I. Phase II expands this logic to assess delay, wind miles along each route, and severity of impact from significant weather phenomena. In the NAS, approximately 70 percent of flight delays are caused by weather. In the winter months, airport surface winds and low ceiling and visibility account for nearly 75 percent of these weather delays, with the remaining 25 percent caused by convective and winter weather. Summer months observe more than 40 percent of the weather delays attributed to rain and thunderstorms. By providing a planning tool to explore alternate routes in a timely manner using the most up-to-date TMI and weather information, flight delays can be mitigated or reduced. ARAT integrates with the DIP Platform to consume a digital set of TMI information and apply it to individual and macro-level flight routes. This allows flight operators to better understand weather implications on proposed alternate routes and efficiently choose the best route amendment to file. It will accelerate the implementation of NASA technologies in the current and future NAS by leveraging DIP and providing a means to demonstrate the benefits of DIP. Objectives Technical Objective 1: Register ARAT on the Digital Information Platform Technical Objective 2: Integrate ARAT with CDDR Technical Objective 3: Expansion of Features and Capabilities Technical Objective 4: Benefits Analysis Proposed Deliverables The ARAT software with integrated machine learning prediction of flight delay and recommendations of optimal alternative routes A machine learning model that accurately predicts delay in the presence of various weather conditions and Traffic Management Initiatives A historical route database with appending data from ARAT service

Potential NASA applications include registration of decomposed ARAT services with the Digital Information Platform, enabling DIP’s mission to expose external services to the Platform’s participants. This would include direct integration with NASA’s Collaborative Digital Departure Reroute (CDDR) tool, adding weather impacts to compute benefits more accurately on alternate routes. Integration with existing airline flight planning tools to address the shortfalls of Traffic Management Initiatives (TMIs) not included in the current set of digital information.

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