Improving Situation Awareness with a Traffic Management Portal

Obtaining common situation awareness has been repeatedly identified as an operational shortfall by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) traffic managers. Traffic managers balance National Airspace System (NAS) capacity and traffic demand in the face of daily variability and uncertainty. They each construct a mental picture of the actual and predicted operational situations by combining observations from many different visual displays (e.g., traffic, weather, airspace) with data from multiple automated information systems. The retrieval of relevant data to develop situation awareness can be a scavenger hunt, and traffic management experience plays the greatest role in determining actions to take. To coordinate potential solutions, traffic managers verbally communicate their mental picture of the operation to others who are impacted by the problem, who in turn have their own views and experience. Differences between these views must be reconciled to reach a decision. The MITRE Corporation’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (MITRE CAASD) has developed a concept to improve access to relevant information and traffic management collaboration. This concept, Traffic Flow Management Initiatives Performance Status (TIPS), provides a traffic management portal with quick reference access to relevant operational information, replacing the scavenger hunt for data with a comprehensive, shareable, integrated system view. The portal allows users to select and configure applications (apps) designed to reduce the need for mental integration by providing cues that alert them to potential problems, based on traffic-manager defined thresholds. This paper documents the need, the idea, and the technical approach used to develop the framework and initial app set.