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Characterization of Days Based On Analysis of National Airspace System Performance MetricsDays of operations in the National Airspace System can be described in term of traffic demand, runway conditions, equipment outages, and surface and enroute weather conditions. These causes manifest themselves in terms of departure delays, arrival delays, enroute delays and traffic flow management delays, Traffic flow management initiatives such as, ground stops, ground delay programs, miles-in-trail restrictions, rerouting and airborne holding are imposed to balance the air traffic demand with respect to the available capacity, In order to maintain operational efficiency of the National Airspace System, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) maintains delay sad other statistics in the Air Traffic Operations Network (OPSNET) and the Aviation System Performance Metrics (ASPM) databases. OPSNET data includes reportable delays of fifteen minutes ox more experienced by Instrument Flight Rule (IFR) flights. Numbers of aircraft affected by departure delays, enroute delays, arrival delays and traffic flow delays are recorded in the OPSNET data. ASPM data consist of number of actual departures, number of canceled departures, percentage of on time departures, percentage of on time gate arrivals, taxi-out delays. taxi-in delays, gate delays, arrival delays and block delays. Surface conditions at the major U.S. airports are classified in terms of Instrument Meteorological Condition (IMC) and Visual Meteorological Condition (VMC) as a function of the time of the day in the ASPM data. The main objective of this paper is to use OPSNET and ASPM data to classify the days in the datasets into few distinct groups, where each group is separated from the other groups in terms of a distance metric. The motivations for classifying the days are two-fold, 1) to enable selection of days of traffic with particular operational characteristics for concept evaluation using system-wide simulation systems such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Airspace Concepts Evaluation Tool (ACES) and 2) to enable evaluation of a given day with respect to the characteristics of the classified groups. The first part of the paper is devoted to the analysis of major trends seen in the OPSNET and ASPM data. The second part of the paper is devoted to describing features or measures derived from the OPSNET and ASPM data that are suitable for characterizing days, and the classification algorithm used for grouping the days. Finally, the method for evaluating the characteristics of a given day with respect to the properties of the groups is described.
Document ID
20060051870
Acquisition Source
Ames Research Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
Chatterji, Gano B.
(California Univ. Santa Cruz, CA, United States)
Musaffar, Bassam
(California Univ. Santa Cruz, CA, United States)
Meyn, Larry A.
(NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA, United States)
Quon, Leighton K.
(NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA, United States)
Date Acquired
August 23, 2013
Publication Date
January 1, 2006
Subject Category
Air Transportation And Safety
Meeting Information
Meeting: AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technology Conference and Exhibit
Location: Keystone, CO
Country: United States
Start Date: August 21, 2006
End Date: August 24, 2006
Sponsors: American Inst. of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Other

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