A framework for strategic online en-route operations: Integrating traffic flow and strategic conflict managements

This paper proposes an innovative operational framework for strategic online en-route opera-tions, in the trajectory-based operations context. This framework captures the interactions of traffic flow and strategic conflict managements and integrates them in a more harmonized way. The two cores of this framework are a traffic situation awareness method based on digital airspace and a trajectory selection model. The traffic situation awareness method can efficiently calculate the traffic complexity to meet the real-time requirement. The trajectory selection model captures the controller workload accurately and the interactions between traffic flow and strategic conflict managements. Randomized numerical experiments in high-density scenarios are conducted to explore the potential impact of integrating traffic flow and strategic conflict managements. Re-sults show that compared with the existing hierarchical operations method, integrating traffic flow and strategic conflict managements not only significantly improves airspace capacity utili-zation, but also further reduces the number of trajectory conflicts. The method proposed provides a new reference for developing the operational framework for high-density en-route airspace, in the future TBO context. In addition, this method has fine computational efficiency and it can also assist in the design of decision support tools for en-route operations.