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Concept of operations for the Integrated Departure Route Planning (IDRP) tool

September 12, 2011
  |
Project Report
Author:
Hayley J. Reynolds
…
Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report ATC-379
Topic:
decision support
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

A concept of operations for the Integrated Departure Route Planner (IDRP) tool is proposed to address issues in the area of departure route management. By combining information about weather and departure demand, IDRP can both identify potential demand/capacity imbalances and recommend a rerouting option, if appropriate. To effectively implement IDRP into the operational environment, a twophase approach is suggested. The first phase appends IDRP functionality onto the CIWS/RAPT platform, combining departure demand information with the convective weather information, creating a live prototype. This initial phase allows a gradual introduction of functionality into an existing display and enables the gathering of operational data to appropriately evolve IDRP to phase 2. The second phase involves introducing airline route preferences, along with any operational improvements discovered during the initial phase.
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Summary

A concept of operations for the Integrated Departure Route Planner (IDRP) tool is proposed to address issues in the area of departure route management. By combining information about weather and departure demand, IDRP can both identify potential demand/capacity imbalances and recommend a rerouting option, if appropriate. To effectively implement IDRP...

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Concept of operations for the Integrated Departure Route Planning (IDRP) tool

Convective weather avoidance modeling in low-altitude airspace

August 8, 2011
  |
Conference Paper
Author:
Scot E. Campbell
…
Published in:
AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies Conf., 8-11 August 2011.
Topic:
aviation weather
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Thunderstorms are a leading cause of delay in the National Airspace System (NAS), and significant research has been conducted to predict the areas pilots will avoid during a storm. An example of such research is the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM), which provides the likelihood of pilot deviation due to convective weather in a given area. This paper extends the scope of CWAM to include low-altitude flights, which typically occur below the tops of convective weather and have slightly different operational constraints. In general, the set of low-altitude flights includes short-hop routes and low-altitude escape routes used to reduce the impact of convective weather in the terminal area. This paper will discuss the classification procedure, present the performance of low-altitude CWAM on observed and forecasted weather, analyze areas of poor performance, and suggest potential improvements to the model.
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Summary

Thunderstorms are a leading cause of delay in the National Airspace System (NAS), and significant research has been conducted to predict the areas pilots will avoid during a storm. An example of such research is the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM), which provides the likelihood of pilot deviation due to...

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Convective weather avoidance modeling in low-altitude airspace

Update on COSPA storm forecasts

August 2, 2011
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Conference Paper
Author:
Haig Iskenderian
…
Published in:
15th Conf. on Aviation, Range and Aerospace Meteorology, 1-4 August 2011.
Topic:
aviation weather
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Air traffic congestion in the United States (US) is a serious national problem resulting in a critical need for timely, reliable and high quality forecasts of precipitation and echo tops with forecast time horizons of up to 8 hours. In order to address the short-term needs of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as well as the long-term goals of the US's Next Generation Airspace System (NextGen), MIT Lincoln Laboratory, NCAR Research Applications Laboratory and NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory (ESRL) Global Systems Division (GSD) are collaborating on developing a forecast system under funding from the FAA's Aviation Weather Research Program (AWRP). The CoSPA system combines the latest technologies in heuristic nowcasting, extrapolation, statistical techniques and numerical weather prediction to produce rapidly updating (15 min) 0-8 hour forecasts of storm locations, echo tops and intensities. The system blends highly-skillful heuristic nowcasts with output from NOAA's High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) using phase correction and statistical weighting functions. The CoSPA 0-8 hour forecasts are accessible to the aviation community via an operational situation display and a website that builds upon the FAA's Corridor Integrated Weather System (CIWS) and shows current time situational awareness products including: VIL, echo tops, lightning, growth and decay, forecasts and verification contours, as well as an animation of the weather from 8 hours in the past to 8 hours into the future. This presentation will include a brief description of the CoSPA forecast system and display, examples of forecast performance, and provide an overview of recent enhancements to CoSPA as well as ongoing research.
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Summary

Air traffic congestion in the United States (US) is a serious national problem resulting in a critical need for timely, reliable and high quality forecasts of precipitation and echo tops with forecast time horizons of up to 8 hours. In order to address the short-term needs of the Federal Aviation...

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Update on COSPA storm forecasts

Analytical workload model for estimating en route sector capacity in convective weather

June 14, 2011
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Conference Paper
Author:
John Y. Cho
…
Published in:
9th USA/Europe Air Traffic Management Research and Development Sem., ATM 2011, 14-17 June 2011.
Topic:
air traffic control
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

We have extended an analytical workload model for estimating en route sector capacity to include the impact of convective weather. We use historical weather avoidance data to characterize weather blockage, which affects the sector workload in three ways: (1) Increase in the conflict resolution task rate via reduction in available airspace, (2) increase in the recurring task load through the rerouting of aircraft around weather, and (3) increase in the inter-sector coordination rate via reduction in the mean sector transit time. Application of the extended model to observed and forecast data shows promise for future use in network flow models.
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Summary

We have extended an analytical workload model for estimating en route sector capacity to include the impact of convective weather. We use historical weather avoidance data to characterize weather blockage, which affects the sector workload in three ways: (1) Increase in the conflict resolution task rate via reduction in available...

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Analytical workload model for estimating en route sector capacity in convective weather

European and U.S. perspectives on the sharing and integration of weather information into ATM decisions

June 14, 2011
  |
Conference Paper
Author:
David Pace
…
Published in:
ATM2011, 9th USA/Europe Air Traffic Management Research and Development Seminar, 14 June 2011.
Topic:
aviation weather
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Weather is a major source of operational air traffic delays, accounting for 25 to 70 percent of all delays dependent of the geographical region. In today's Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems, a variety of weather information is available to help tactical and strategic planners better anticipate weather events that impact airspace capacity. Regretfully, the information is not always shared amongst all the stakeholders involved or well integrated into the existing ATM environment. This paper describes the high-level concepts for an improved sharing and integration or weather information into Air Traffic Management Decisions, as well as the current state and anticipated capabilities or the underlying information Management infrastructure.
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Summary

Weather is a major source of operational air traffic delays, accounting for 25 to 70 percent of all delays dependent of the geographical region. In today's Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems, a variety of weather information is available to help tactical and strategic planners better anticipate weather events that impact...

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European and U.S. perspectives on the sharing and integration of weather information into ATM decisions

Uses for field communication data in designing air traffic management decision support

May 31, 2011
  |
Conference Paper
Author:
Hayley J. Reynolds
…
Published in:
10th Conf. on Naturalistic Decision Making, 31 May 2011.
Topic:
air traffic management
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

In this paper, example uses of field communication data are provided and how these data impact the evolution of the Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) for air traffic management is introduced. Simple communications analyses are provided that illustrate how communications can be used to improve what decision support is provided, who it is provided to, and in what context to present the support. Communications data is also shown to aid in contextualizing the decision support to better fit within the decision support framework in existence, which is critical to the success of situation awareness systems.
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Summary

In this paper, example uses of field communication data are provided and how these data impact the evolution of the Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) for air traffic management is introduced. Simple communications analyses are provided that illustrate how communications can be used to improve what decision support is provided...

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Uses for field communication data in designing air traffic management decision support

Convective weather avoidance modeling for low-altitude routes

May 31, 2011
  |
Project Report
Author:
Scot E. Campbell
…
Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report ATC-376
Topic:
weather
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Thunderstorms are a leading cause of delay in the National Airspace System (NAS), and significant research has been conducted to predict the areas pilots will avoid during a storm. An example of such research is the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM), which provides the likelihood of pilot deviation due to convective weather in a given area. This report extends the scope of CWAM to include low-altitude flights, which typically occur below the tops of convective weather and have slightly differentoperational constraints. In general, the set of low-altitude flights include short-hop routes and low-altitude escape routes used to reduce the impact of convective weather in the termnial area. For classification, low altitude flights are identified as either deviations or non-deviations, and the corresponding weather features are analyzed. Precipitation intensity is observed to be the best predictor of deviation in the low-altitude flight regime, as compared to the differenc ein altitude between the flight and the echo tops for en route flights. Additionally, the low-altitude CWAM performs better than the departure CWAM currently used in the Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) when tested on deterministic weather data.
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Summary

Thunderstorms are a leading cause of delay in the National Airspace System (NAS), and significant research has been conducted to predict the areas pilots will avoid during a storm. An example of such research is the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM), which provides the likelihood of pilot deviation due to...

READ MORE
Convective weather avoidance modeling for low-altitude routes

Estimation of potential IDRP benefits during convective weather SWAP

May 26, 2011
  |
Project Report
Author:
Richard A. DeLaura
…
Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report ATC-381
Topic:
air traffic control
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

This document presents a preliminary analysis of potential departure delay reduction benefits in New York as the result of the use of the Integrated Departure Route Planning (IDRP) tool during convective severe weather avoidance programs (SWAP). The analysis is based on weather impact and air traffic data from operations between May and September 2010 in the New York metroplex region. Two methodologies were employed in the analysis: "flight pool" and "resource pool." In the flight pool methodology, individual flights with excessive taxi times were identified, and opportunities to find potential alternative reroutes using information that IDRP will provide were assessed. In the resource pool methodology, route impact minutes were tallied over several days, based on the judgment of a human analysis, and opportunities to recover capacity lost to route impacts via IDRP-identified reroutes were estimated. The flight pool methodology estimated that approximately 156 hours of delay could be saved through the use of IDRP over a full SWAP season. The resource pool methodology estimated that approximately 15% of capacity lost to convective weather impacts could be recovered via IDRP-based reroutes. It should be noted that the potential benefits are based on several assumptions that are described in detail in the text of the report. The estimation of delay savings due to reroute is also speculative. It is very difficult to ascertain when the assignment of a reroute actually makes use of underutilized capacity and when the reroute simply shifts the problem from one congested resource to another. Further research is needed to develop reliable metrics that can guide the assessment of reroute impacts on overall traffic management performance.
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Summary

This document presents a preliminary analysis of potential departure delay reduction benefits in New York as the result of the use of the Integrated Departure Route Planning (IDRP) tool during convective severe weather avoidance programs (SWAP). The analysis is based on weather impact and air traffic data from operations between...

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Estimation of potential IDRP benefits during convective weather SWAP

Making departure management weather impact models airspace-adaptable: adapting the New York Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) to Chicago departure airspace

May 26, 2011
  |
Project Report
Author:
Richard A. DeLaura
…
Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report ATC-378
Topic:
air traffic control
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

The Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) operational prototype was deployed to Chicago in the summer of 2010, the first RAPT deployment outside of the New York departure airspace for which it was originally developed. The goal of the deployment was to evaluate the adaptability of RAPT's airspace definition, departure management and weather impact models to different terminal areas throughout the National Airspace System (NAS). This report presents the results of a summer-long evaluation of the Chicago RAPT operational prototype, in which the performance of RAPT algorithms and the effectiveness of the RAPT Concept of Operations were assessed. The evaluation included observations made by researchers simultaneously stationed at O'Hare terminal (ORD), the Chicago TRACON (C90), and the Chicago Air Route Traffic Control Center (ZAU) during several days of convective weather impact and post-event analysis of air traffic data from the Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS) and RAPT weather impact predictions and departure management guidance. The study found that significant departure delay reduction could be achieved through the use of RAPT in Chicago, and that RAPT effectiveness in "typical" corner post airspaces like Chicago could be further increased with some modifications to the Concept of Operations, user training, and site adaptation.
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Summary

The Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) operational prototype was deployed to Chicago in the summer of 2010, the first RAPT deployment outside of the New York departure airspace for which it was originally developed. The goal of the deployment was to evaluate the adaptability of RAPT's airspace definition, departure management...

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Making departure management weather impact models airspace-adaptable: adapting the New York Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) to Chicago departure airspace

Distributed multi-modal sensor system for searching a foliage-covered region

April 28, 2011
  |
Conference Paper
Author:
Matthew R Fetterman
…
Published in:
2011 IEEE Conf. on Technologies for Practical Robot Applications (TePRA), 28 April 2011, pp. 7-14.
Topic:
sensors
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

We designed and constructed a system that includes aircraft, ground vehicles, and throwable sensors to search a semiforested region that was partially covered by foliage. The system contained 4 radio-controlled (RC) trucks, 2 aircraft, and 30 SensorMotes (throwable sensors). We also investigated communications links, search strategies, and system architecture. Our system is designed to be low-cost, contain a variety of sensors, and distributed so that the system is robust even if individual components are lost.
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Summary

We designed and constructed a system that includes aircraft, ground vehicles, and throwable sensors to search a semiforested region that was partially covered by foliage. The system contained 4 radio-controlled (RC) trucks, 2 aircraft, and 30 SensorMotes (throwable sensors). We also investigated communications links, search strategies, and system architecture. Our...

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Distributed multi-modal sensor system for searching a foliage-covered region
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