Flow managers and senior controllers working for air navigation service providers (ANSPs) ensure safe workloads for air traffic controllers by correctly dividing airspace into sectors. When traffic exceeds sector capacity, they may delay flights (regulate flights) to keep controller workloads manageable. These delays can affect airline operations and passenger satisfaction. The situation is even more complex when one considers that in Europe most flights cross areas of responsibility of different ANSPs. The resulting coordination is managed by the Network Manager to accordingly balance traffic loads and balance sometimes conflicting needs of stakeholders. However, increasing traffic and more frequent unexpected events continue to challenge this balance, as safety constraints must be respected and the business needs reconciled in a very dynamic environment.

The proposed solution utilises a set of tools to ease the coordination and constraint reconciliation both on local and network levels. To correctly understand the status and needs of various service provides the solution proposes an integrated spot management – methodology to communicate airspace status in a uniform and systemised manner that increases situational awareness of network stakeholders. To resolve the existing demand issues (also called demand-capacity imbalances) the solution proposes optimised demand measure selection (i.e. optimised delay allocation) done with help of automated DCB solvers (both on local and network levels). To include the business needs the solution proposes privacy-protected regional multi-constraint reconciliation system that allows airlines to propose TTA (target time of arrival) updates when under regulation. And finally, the solution follows the CP1 mandate to tackle and share complexity by addressing the network-level complexity sharing and its use to improve network stakeholders’ awareness.

The solution regulatory and standard analysis is at the initial stage, but it is expected that some key regulations related to flow and network management will need to be amended to allow the implementation of the concept.

It is not expected that the solution will have any standardization aspect.

BENEFITS:

• Reduced overall en-route delay – better punctuality.
• More optimised routing resulting in reduced fuel burn.
• Better use of available airspace capacity (especially in difficult situations – like widespread weather event or large military activity)