Collaborative Decision Making Improves the FAA Ground-Delay Program
The Problem
The U.S. Federal Government's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has the important responsibility of managing airports' volume of arriving and departing flights. At times, airports are forced to reduce their arrival capacity and suffer congestion when they cannot keep pace with the demand placed by arriving aircraft. In these cases, the FAA uses a ground-delay program (GDP) to delay flights before they depart from their origin airports, keeping traffic at an acceptable level for the affected arrival airport. Air-traffic managers sometimes lacked current data and a common situational awareness when running a GDP. Solving these problems required analytics expertise in modeling numerous flights and arrivals throughout the complex system.
The Analytics Solution
Working with the FAA and the airline community, Metron, Inc. and Volpe National Transportation Systems Center improved the process by using real-time data exchange between all users, new algorithms to assign flight-arrival slots, and new software at FAA facilities and airlines. The Ground Delay Program Enhancement (GDPE) project under Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) allocated arrival slots to aircraft at airports during time periods when demand exceeds capacity. Decision makers at the FAA and the airlines used the GDPE suite of tools to keep congestion at an arrival airport at acceptable levels by issuing ground delays to aircraft before departure.
The Value
GDPE significantly reduced delays, improved the flow of air traffic into airports, improved compliance to controlled times of departure, and improved data quality and predictability. GDPE also resulted in equity in delays across carriers and often avoided the necessity to implement FAA ground delay programs, which can be disruptive to air carrier operations. From January 1998 through January 2000, almost 90,000 hours of scheduled delay were avoided due to GDPE, resulting in cost savings of more than $150 million for the airline industry.
