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.

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.

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