The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is one of the largest Air Navigation Service Providers, managing air traffic for more than 15% of the world’s airspace. Today’s Air Traffic Control (ATC) system cannot meet the growth of the air traffic activities, which brings with more unprecedented delays. At the same time, Air Traffic Controllers are facing higher workload than ever before. The FAA ...

Air traffic management is a complex system that includes aircrafts, crew, air traffic controllers, automation, traffic rules and climatic conditions that can affect in decision making during the different flight phases (Callantine, 2004). The human factor is the most relevant aspect in this management process, involving controllers working under severe stress and an increasing flow of aircrafts...

Introduction: The NAS is the infrastructure that supports the 60000 daily flights over the United States. The hub and spoke operations of various airlines has changed traffic patterns and contributed significantly to congestion and delay in the NAS. Growth of air traffic, matching or exceeding growth in capacity and occasional bad weather, has added to this congestion and delay. Air traffic del...

The current air traffic management systems are not able to manage the enormous capacities of air traffic perfectly and have not sufficient capability to service different types of flights. Free flight is a new concept presented potentially to solve problems in the current air traffic management system. The free flight concept changes the current centralized and command-control airspace system (...

The ability to provide flexible, automated management of air traffic is critical to meeting the ever increasing needs of the next generation air transportation systems. This problem is particularly complex as it requires the integration of many factors including, updated information (e.g., changing weather info), conflicting priorities (e.g., different airlines), limited resources (e.g., air tr...

The most efficient size and shape of air traffic control facility airspace boundaries in the Next Generation Air Transportation System will not necessarily be the same as in past organizations of the system. As limitations of communications and surveillance technology become less important for drawing boundaries, operational efficiency will take a greater role in defining the airspace allocated...

A fuzzy reasoning-based method for scheduling air traffic in the terminal area has been designed at the NASA Ames Research Center and operationally tested at the Dallas/Fort Worth Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON). The scheduling system sequences and assigns landing times to arrival aircraft by utilizing continuous updates of aircraft radar data and controller inputs. The scheduling algo...