A framework for strategic online en-route operations: Integrating traffic flow and strategic conflict managements

Abstract

This paper proposes an innovative operational framework for strategic online en-route operations, in the trajectory-based operations context. This framework captures the interactions of traffic flow and strategic conflict managements and integrates them in a more harmonized way. The two cores of this framework are a traffic situation awareness method based on digital airspace and a trajectory selection model. The traffic situation awareness method can efficiently calculate the traffic complexity to meet the real-time requirement. The trajectory selection model captures the controller workload accurately and the interactions between traffic flow and strategic conflict managements. Randomized numerical experiments in high-density scenarios are conducted to explore the potential impact of integrating traffic flow and strategic conflict managements. Results show that compared with the existing hierarchical operations method, integrating traffic flow and strategic conflict managements not only significantly improves airspace capacity utilization, but also further reduces the number of trajectory conflicts. The method proposed provides a new reference for developing the operational framework for high-density en-route airspace, in the future TBO context. In addition, this method has fine computational efficiency and it can also assist in the design of decision support tools for en-route operations.