Accrued Delay Application in Trajectory-Based Operations

Abstract

The air traffic management system lacks integration among its elements often due to using inconsistent information, models, and metrics about the traffic. Transitioning to trajectory-based operations, whereby flights are managed by full trajectories in space and time, will enable more integration, with the help of increased automation. Building on trajectory-based operations, an "accrued delay" metric is proposed, which continuously measures the amount of delay that a flight has accumulated up to the current time, including delays incurred during the current flight and inherited from previous flights through the turnaround process. Through a time-based metering and scheduling example, we show how using accrued delay as a metric can help integrate the decision-making across multiple decision horizons, leading to more efficient and balanced access to airspace services. We show that when prioritizing flights that have already accrued high delay because of a constrained runway resource, significant gains are achieved in terms of reducing total delay and its variance. We studied the sensitivity of these gains to numerous factors, such as time-based versus distance-based horizons, horizon size, and errors in conformance to scheduled times.