Future Flight Demand Generation Tool

Abstract

*† ‡ Aviation and Air Traffic Management (ATM) researchers are increasingly utilizing complex regional or NAS-wide simulations to evaluate future concepts. These analyses require tens of thousands of flights (a flight schedule) that are accurately defined in time and space throughout the flight (a flight plan). Current methods of generating these huge input datasets are costly and time-intensive. These limitations force researchers to rely on a few flight demand data sets for their evaluations. We develop a powerful, automated tool to provide cost-effective, flexible future demand generation in a short amount of time. This tool provides the user with extensive options in defining future demand data sets tailored to their evaluation needs, a capability that does not exist today. The automation will save significant time and both governmental and industry resources currently expended in generating a very few future demand data sets. By using this tool, more demand sets reflecting different instances of the future are constructed. Thus, this will result in the ability for researchers to easily generate realistic future traffic sets to support improved NAS improvement benefits assessments.