Airspace Operations Lab @ NASA Ames

This paper proposes a novel approach to calculating Relative Trajectory Costs (RTC) as part of a new third-party tool to enable advanced airborne reroute operations. A selection of cost and delay factors, such as Crew, Fuel, Airspace Cost and Downstream Congestion, have been modeled to rank reroute options within the NextGen capability called the Trajectory Options Set (TOS). Feedback from airline operations subject matter experts suggested potential limitations of generalized cost modeling due to the divergence in cost estimation between different airlines based on their proprietary business models. Suggestions were made to allow a future RTC tool to allow the airlines to tune the models based on requirements. Nevertheless, we successfully demonstrated the ability of using automation to rank trajectories in airborne reroute scenarios which was well received by the participants. The automated ranking helps to alleviate the additional workload in this airline-centric concept in which responsibilities once held by air traffic service providers are then shifted towards the airline industry.