Service Level Expectation Setting for Air Traffic Flow Management: Practical Challenges and Benefits Assessment

This paper describes a mechanism for determining consensus service level expectations to be used in designing air traffic management initiatives (TMIs). Our approach, which employs the Majority Judgment voting mechanism, enables those flight operators impacted by a potential TMI to provide service level preference information to an air navigation service provider (ANSP) that initiates the TMI. The output of the process is a numeric vector that specifies performance goals for the TMI enabling the ANSP to tradeoff competing performance criteria, when designing the TMI. Earlier work has described key components of the overall approach. This paper gives a comprehensive view and also gives the results of a fast-time simulation benefits assessment and a human-in-the-loop simulation.