Summary
The Wake Turbulence Program within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is considering a number of new procedures for safely reducing the wake vortex spacing requirements between aircraft. One category of procedures investigates wind-dependent procedures, i.e., procedures that can be applied when wind conditions are expected to transport the wake from a lead aircraft away from the path of a trailing aircraft. MIT Lincoln Laboratory developed a Wind Forecast Algorithm (WFA) to determine when conditions allow these wind-dependent procedures to be available to traffic managers. The baseline WFA is used within the Wake Turbulence Mitigation for Departures (WTMD) system, which establishes spacing procedures for departures on closely spaced parallel runways. A number of new procedures are also under consideration, each of which will require a modification and/or expansion of the baseline WFA. With time, the volume and number of disparate data sources used in the development process has steadily increased to the point where the existing development environment has become cumbersome and inadequate. As a result, through support of the FAA Wake Turbulence Program, MIT Lincoln Laboratory has undergone a complete overhaul of the computer processing and storage architecture used for WFA development. This will serve two main purposes. First, it will greatly expedite the development process, which is highly iterative and requires increasingly large volumes of data. Second, an updated architecture design will allow for an expeditious transition of developmental systems into the operational environment within FAA's NextGen framework. A key focus of this report describes how the new design is sufficiently compatible and flexible to serve within this anticipated FAA framework. The unified application architecture and infrastructure being designed and implemented will support continuing development, playback requirements, and real-time deployments. This architecture is composed of several application components including a wind data extract-transform-loaf (ETL) application, the WFA algorithm, and a display interface to accomodate both the development process and for potential use within the FAA operational environment. The Wind-ETL application component acquires, processes, and archives wind data from a variety of NOAA-based hourly forecasts and airport-vicinity weather measurement equipment. This wind data is ingested by the WFA, which computes and disseminates its availability predictions to the WTMx Display application component, which archives these predictions and also allows for presentation to the airport tower supervisor via the WTMx display user interface decision support tool. This architecture is designed to be flexible to accepting new weather data feeds, scalable to the high bandwidth and processing and storage capabilities required, provide sufficient automation and self-healing capabilities, and portable to allow its introduction into alternate facility sites and its integration into other FAA software systems.