Assessing Resilience of Scheduled Performance-Based Navigation Arrival Operations

This paper assesses the resilience of scheduled Performance-Based Navigation (PBN) arrival operations. Resilience is defined as an ability to return to nominal operations following a schedule perturbation. Results from a Human-in-the- Loop (HITL) experiment that included off-nominal events to perturb the schedule are described. The schedule comes from a precision trajectory-based arrival manager. The experiment collected data regarding the response to perturbed schedules in three conditions, where: 1) a disturbance rejection algorithm made schedule adjustments automatically, 2) a Traffic Management Coordinator (TMC) participant made schedule adjustments manually, or 3) no schedule adjustments were made. Analyses showed that the simulation’s scheduled PBN operations have inherent resilience, recovering from more than half of the perturbed schedules even with no schedule adjustments. Resilience to the same off-nominal events improved with schedule adjustments; an increased proportion of perturbed schedules recovered within the length of operation run, and the average duration of the schedule’s perturbed state decreased. Compared to the manual schedule adjustments condition, a greater number of schedule adjustments occurred for the same off-nominal events in the automated condition. However, perturbed schedules were recovered more frequently and perturbations were less severe in the automated condition. Subjective and objective workload in the manual and the automated schedule adjustment conditions were similar to the no schedule adjustment condition.