Improving Support for Contingency Planning in Air Traffic Flow Management

Abstract

As air traffic continues to increase, it will be increasingly important to maximize use of available capacity. Traffic management coordinators explicitly incorporate contingency planning into their decision-making processes, but current Traffic Flow Management (TFM) tools provide limited support for such contingency planning. This paper describes an effort to explicitly support contingency planning in TFM, allowing automation to better align with the human’s approach to the situation. We propose a modeling framework and report on initial operational feedback indicating that our modeling framework captures the essence of TFM workflow.