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When airport arrival capacity is reduced, it may not meet the demand placed by arriving aircraft. In these cases, the FAA enacts a ground-delay program (GDP) to delay flights before they depart from their origin airports, keeping traffic at an acceptable level for the affected arrival airport. However, air-traffic managers sometimes lacked current data and a common situational awareness when running a GDP. Working with the FAA and the airline community, Metron, Inc. and Volpe National Transportation Systems Center improved the process by using real-time data exchange between all users, new algorithms to assign flight-arrival slots, and new software at FAA facilities and airlines. This paper reflects the views and opinions of the authors and does not necessarily reflect that of the FAA.
Traffic in the US National Airspace System is expected to increase by three to five percent annually for the next 15 years [FAA 2000]. And while the number of aircraft in the sky grows larger, the National Airspace System remains a static resource. The system needs to accommodate the increasing number of aircraft without compromising safety and efficiency. This is the job of the air-traffic-management system.
Two entities comprise air-traffic management: air-traffic control, which ensures safe separation between aircraft, and traffic-flow management, which balances demand and capacity to maintain safe and efficient traffic flow. Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) is a joint government-industry initiative aimed at improving the traffic-flow-management aspect of air-traffic management by increasing the exchange of information and improving decision-support tools.
CDM really began in 1991, when the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA's) Air Traffic Management office commissioned an analysis to measure the effects of the airlines' flight-substitution process on the efficacy of ground-delay programs (GDPs). CDM started as a very small effort among a few committed individuals in the airline community who met on their own time outside of any office. The group encountered and, through the sheer persistence of its participants, overcame numerous cultural, political, and financial obstacles during the development of the CDM program [Wambsganss 1997]. The program is now the acknowledged means of developing and modifying the traffic-flow-management system, with participants from every arm of the aviation community involved in defining procedures and automation requirements.
Scheduled to become part of the FAA operational system in June 2000,...