Dynamic allocation and benefit assessment of NextGen flow corridors

A flow-based modeling approach is proposed to identify candidate airspace for high-density flow corridors. The input to the model is a set of projected user-preferred, wind optimal, and unconstrained 4D trajectories (4DTs). We compute Velocity Vector Fields (VVFs) in the 4D space-time and cluster the velocity vectors both in time and space to define flow of aircraft when they fly their preferred trajectories under high capacity conditions. A sliding time window is implemented to dynamically create and optimize corridors’ coordinates based on the changes in preferred trajectories. From this process we compute a NAS-wide corridor network that mimics the dynamics of user preferred trajectories. In operational setting, flights will have the option of joining a corridor that is closest to their optimal trajectory. Using NAS-wide simulation, we asses the benefit of corridor network by comparing efficiency gained by joining the corridor network against extra distance traveled to join the network. We show that much of the overall corridors benefit may be gained by creating very few corridors.