A Human-Relatable Course of Action Planner for Air Traffic Coordinators

Traffic Managers, Supervisors and Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC) Specialists have a critical and significant responsibility in the ATM system to deal with widely varying contingencies and issues. Although many tools exist to support the Traffic Manager in fulfilling their duties, these tools generally focus on one specific type of traffic management initiative and the planning and decisions suggested by these tools are not integrated together. While much attention has been focused on decision support tools and information systems for the controllers, only minimal attention has been given to decision support tools for the Supervisors and Traffic Managers other than the specific traffic management initiatives. We propose to develop a Course of Action Planner for Air Traffic Coordinators. Given assumed inputs from all systems that may affect the Coordinator's tasks (via SWIM), the planner will develop a set of required and prioritized tasks, and feasible options for solutions to the identified issues. Each option will contain a list of actions (including TMIs) that, when combined, will address the identified situation.

Some Air Traffic Coordinators in the operational ATC facilities today have information overload from too many tools. On the other hand, some Coordinators (particularly Supervisors) have very few tools at their disposal to support planning and decision-making. There is currently no tool available for FAA traffic managers which allows them to model the affect of a comprehensive combination of TMIs, let alone provide suggestions for the best set of TMIs to fit the anticipated system constraints. TMIs tend to be issued independently of each other, with no ability to model the interaction between restrictions. The TFM community would greatly benefit by a planner designed to suggest a set of actions and initiatives from the TFM Toolbox that would best meet the anticipated capacity constraints, minimizing delay and maximizing the utilization of the available resources.

The Air Traffic Course of Action Planner system developed in Phase 2 can augment NASA's suite of ATM modeling applications. It can be integrated with FACET, allowing task plans, including TMIs suggested by the system, to be played out in simulations in FACET. The system can also aid NASA researchers in understanding the interactions between actions of different ATC facilities, and the interactions between FAA actions and Flight Operator actions. This capability will allow NASA to remain at the forefront of ATM research and will provide relevant and valuable research results to guide the NextGen evolution.

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