ABSTRACT
Expected air traffic increases until 2040 are likely to create a significant capacity problem that airspace systems in Europe and US may struggle to accommodate. To advance their aviation systems, the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) has been proposed in the United States together with the Single European Sky ATM Research Programme (SESAR) in Europe. These ‘next-generation’ approaches aim at achieving incremental benefits over the next 10 to 20 years, taking advantage of new technologies in the ATM domain. Advances in route clearance technologies, such as trajectory-based operations and digital communications have enabled aircraft automation undertake separation tasks, freeing air traffic controllers to complete other traffic management tasks for a larger number of aircraft. This vision for future ATM systems is based on a large-scale computer system (Willems and Koros 2007) that would determine and negotiate with flight crews, airline operations managers, and air traffic controllers, many 4-dimensional (4D) Trajectory Based Operations (TBOs). A System Wide Information Management (SWIM) system will evolve to become a real-time repository and an archive for all airspace information to promote comprehensive information exchange across all stakeholders.
