Strategic Traffic Flow Management Concept of Operations

Abstract

*† ‡ § With increases in weather-related delays, the Air Traffic Management (ATM) community is calling for enhanced functionality for integrating strategic weather information with Traffic Flow Management (TFM) decisions. This TFM Concept of Operations describes the language, process, and technologies required to increase the effectiveness of uncertain weather information when making strategic TFM decisions constrained by convective weather. TFM needs a mechanism to reason about probabilistic weather forecasts in a way that balances the safety and efficiency of traffic flows and ensures that uncertainty is logically taken into account. Building on the Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) paradigm, we enable the Collaborative Convective Forecast Product (CCFP) to capture multiple potential weather scenarios and provide a mechanism for air traffic managers and airline dispatchers to use probabilistic forecasts in their severe weather avoidance planning. A Probabilistic Decision Tree models the problem state space and maps to current weather avoidance practices, TFM decision points, and uncertain weather forecasts. Our concept also calls for new forecast products that include estimation of the uncertainty in weather predictions in a format that is relevant to the ATM decision making process. Finally, we need a decision support tool with algorithms to help make decisions using probabilistic forecast products.