A paper titled "
Modeling Relative Trajectory Costs for Airborne Trajectory Reroutes using Trajectory Option Sets" (Garzon Galindo, K., Lee, P., & Brasil, C., 2021) has been awarded Best Paper of the Trajectory Modelling & Optimization Session at this year’s 40th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (
https://2021.dasconline.org/download-official-program/). This paper was presented during the Air Traffic Management Machine Learning & Automation Track and describes some of the work done by NASA addressing Increasing Diverse Operations in the National Airspace System. To assist collaboration between air navigation service providers and airlines, a new set of models is being proposed to calculate Relative Trajectory Costs (RTCs) to rank-order alternative airline-preferred trajectories within an airborne reroute scenario. Currently, RTCs are used only for pre-departures utilizing ground delay as the main cost metric. The models proposed in this paper aim to account for multiple delay factors for airborne flights that better reflect the airline business case. Thus, enabling an automated mechanism to prioritize the most cost-effective airborne reroute options that fits the airline's bottom line, thereby aiding the airline dispatchers in their decision-making process.
