Workload-Based Capacity for Air Traffic Management

The charter of FAA is to promote the safe, orderly, and expeditious use of the National Airspace System (NAS). To ensure that traffic flow is safe and efficient, FAA needs to know the expected traffic demand on the sector and the sector's capacity to accommodate that demand. When sector capacity is inadequate to meet the demand, congestion occurs. To ensure that safety is not compromised, FAA often takes action to reduce demand or increase capacity to avoid congestion. The MITRE Corporation's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development developed a time-on-task workload model to assess capacity and congestion in en route NAS sectors. A metric was developed and used along with the workload generated by the model and a workload threshold to estimate sector capacity. The metric, as constructed, enabled equitable comparison of capacity of different sectors, regardless of size. A field and lab evaluation of the workload model was used to quantify the model's task coverage and to calibrate its parameter values. The workload model was used to generate workload, capacity, and congestion profiles for selected en route sectors during good weather and during convective weather. The data used to generate the profiles can be used for various air traffic management applications.