Estimating the impact of changes to regional airspace and airway design structure is complicated by many extrinsic factors, which often renders detailed simulation impractical. This study presents an innovative, data-driven combination of multivariate regression and discrete-event simulation that enables estimation of user benefits with a reasonable level of effort.Two airspace enhancements proposed by the Federal Aviation Administration along the east coast of the United States are evaluated to estimate their impact on air traffic efficiency. The implementation of East Coast High Altitude Performance Based Navigation Routes and a sector realignment in the Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center will reduce the need for traffic flow management initiatives to keep airspace congestion within manageable limits. This paper is a technical description of the modeling approach, method, and results.The study applies two complementary methodologies- an air traffic queuing model to assess the impact of critical feature changes where the airspace geometry is simple, and a series of regression models which isolates individual effects from empirical data that are confounded by many exogenous influences. Computational tools for understanding air traffic management as a queue or a network of queues are well established. Queuing models offer tight control over input parameters and provide desired output metrics. Regressions, on the other hand do not require modeling of each separate influence, as long as the variables under study explain enough of the system’s behavior that the residues can be described by normal distributions.The applied methods of estimating the user benefits of airspace improvements are effective, and much faster than full-scale regional simulations. The two halves of the model, regression and queueing, complement each other to produce a characteristic representation of operations under a variety of possible future airspace and procedural structures.
Hybrid Queuing-Regression Model Application for Airspace Analysis
2019-04-01
759885 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
Directional Demand, Capacity and Queuing Delay in En-Route Airspace
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2009
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