Evaluation of the Monotonic Lagrangian Grid and Lat-Long Grid for Air Traffic Management

The Air Traffic Monotonic Lagrangian Grid (ATMLG) is used to simulate a 24 hour period of air traffic flow in the National Airspace System (NAS). During this time period, there are 41,594 flights over the United States, and the flight plan information (departure and arrival airports and times, and waypoints along the way) are obtained from an Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS) dataset. Two simulation procedures are tested and compared: one based on the Monotonic Lagrangian Grid (MLG), and the other based on the stationary Latitude-Longitude (LatLong) grid. Simulating one full day of air traffic over the United States required the following amounts of CPU time on a single processor of an SGI Altix: 88 s for the MLG method, and 163 s for the Lat-Long grid method. We present a discussion of the amount of CPU time required for each of the simulation processes (updating aircraft trajectories, sorting, conflict detection and resolution, etc.), and show that the main advantage of the MLG method is that it is a general sorting algorithm that can sort on multiple properties. We discuss how many MLG neighbors must be considered in the separation assurance procedure in order to ensure a five-mile separation buffer between aircraft, and we investigate the effect of removing waypoints from aircraft trajectories. When aircraft choose their own trajectory, there are more flights with shorter duration times and fewer CD&R maneuvers, resulting in significant fuel savings.