Task order: possible benefits for advanced interval management operations 1.introduction/background:improvements in communication, navigation, and surveillance systems in the national airspace…

Task order: possible benefits for advanced interval management operations 1.introduction/background:improvements in communication, navigation, and surveillance systems in the national airspace system (NAS) have led to the development of multiple concepts to improve efficiency and enhance safety. For example, the deployment of automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (adsb) will provide controllers access to more accurate aircraft state information and more frequent update rates than currently available via radar systems. Aircraft equipped with adsb transmitters (adsb out) transmit highly accurate global navigation satellite system (gnss)-based position and velocity information. Aircraft that are additionally equipped with adsb receivers (adsb in) are able to receive surveillance information about other aircraft in the surrounding airspace. Interval management (IM) is an adsb-enabled suite of applications that use ground and flight deck capabilities as well as procedures designed to support the relative spacing of aircraft. Relative spacing refers to managing the position of one aircraft to a time or distance relative to another aircraft as opposed to a static reference point such as a point on the ground or clock time. This results in improved inter-aircraft spacing precision and is expected to allow aircraft to be consistently spaced closer to the applicable separation standard than current operations. In 2011, the federal aviation administration (FAA)-chartered ADS-b in aviation rulemaking committee (ARC) published their recommendations for future ADS-b-enable airborne applications. Among their recommended list of 10 applications were several interval management-related applications including: GIM-s with wake mitigation; flight deck interval management (FIM) departure operations; FIM for closely spaced parallel runway operations (cspo). NASA has been a leading authority on developing and testing IM operations to date and is looking to determine which of the ADS-b in ARC-recommended applications would be most fruitful to research and develop. In order to make such decisions, data on potential benefits, implementation impediments and rough cost estimates must be developed. Concept descriptions for each application has been developed describing the environment and operational goals. The potential benefits will look at the operations and expected environments and determine the maximum likely user and system benefits that could be achieved. IT would also identify, although not necessarily quantify, expected shortfalls in realizing those benefits. For example, if IM with wake mitigation could alleviate all wake turbulence encounters for single runway operations in certain weather conditions, what would be the maximum throughout increase that could be realized? Would some of those benefits be lost due to an inability to predict when the required weather conditions would be present? The implementation impediments would identify non-environmental issues that delay implementation of the IM application or reduce the possible benefits realized by the users. For example, IM-do may depend on new separation standards to realize the full benefits. This is an implementation impediment, and IT may cause a several-year delay in implementation due to FAA processes to develop the new separation standard. Combined, this information will allow NASA to make an informed choice on which IM application(s) would be most productive to further develop at this time. 2.0 scope, objective(s), applicable documents, and acronyms: 2.1 scope: the scope of this task order is to conduct an analysis of the maximum potential benefits gained thru advanced interval management operations. This benefits analysis will offer insight into the maximum expected benefits of the interval management concept, describe the conditions under which advanced IM operations are viable, and identify the limitation