Controller Workload-based Calculation of Monitor Alert Parameters for En Route Sectors

The National Airspace System (NAS) has 20 conterminous U.S. (CONUS) centers, which are made up of over 700 individual sectors, each of which is worked by an air traffic control team. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses the Traffic Flow Management System’s (TFMS) Monitor Alert (MA) capability to monitor traffic levels in each sector and alert traffic managers when safety and efficiency may be degraded. An alert is given when a sector’s future traffic volume is predicted to exceed its Monitor Alert Parameter (MAP) value. The MAP value is calculated from the sector’s average transit time and a NAS-wide average time to provide services, which is a surrogate workload metric. A method that uses sector-specific workload based on traffic volume and complexity would be an improvement on the current method and would yield more operationally meaningful MAP values. At the request of the FAA, The MITRE Corporation’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) developed an application that uses a sector’s historical workload to calculate its MAP value. Workload estimates, which are based on traffic volume and complexity, are produced by the MITRE time-on-task workload model, which was originally developed to improve upon existing methods to estimate sector capacity and identify congestion in en route sectors. The workload-based MAP application has been used to generate MAP values for en route sectors. These MAP values are in the process of being evaluated by comparing them along with the TFMS MA operational MAP values to truth as determined by subject matter experts (SMEs) for specific scenarios involving varying levels of traffic volume and complexity.