NAS-wide traffic flow management concept using required time of arrival, separation assurance and weather routing

Substantial research efforts in recent years have investigated advanced planning and decision support tools for the National Airspace System. These tools range from the tactical to the strategic level and include conflict detection and resolution, weather vectoring, traffic spacing, flight conformance monitoring, dynamic airspace configuration, and traffic flow management. Research efforts have also investigated how these different capabilities may work together. Here we construct a system-wide simulation with several prototype decision support tools, of varying levels of fidelity, to investigate their interactions and the resulting system-wide performance. Our initial experimental architecture consists of separation assurance, traffic spacing using required time of arrival, tactical weather vectoring, conformance monitoring, strategic weather routing and traffic flow management using gate delay only.