AN INITIAL BENEFITS ASSESSMENT OF DISTRIBUTED AIR/GROU ND TRAFFIC MANAGEMEN T CONCEPT ELEMENTS

An initial benefits assessment of NASA's Distributed Air/Ground Traffic Management has been co nducted. The single -year, national airspace system -wide benefits were estimated for each of three concept elements: En Route Free Maneuvering, En Route Trajectory Negotiation, and Terminal Arrival Self -Spacing . The study included several analytic compon ents including the identification of benefit mechanisms, forecasting of future traffic demand, trajectory modeling, schedule construction, airport and airspace capacity modeling, human performance modeling of controller workload, regional airspace simulati on (including conflict detection/resolution and trajectory optimization), demand/capacity balancing, and economic valuation. The results show that the two en route concept elements allow significantly more future demanded flights to be accommodated while the terminal area concept enables substantially lower levels of annual delay.