Concept for User-Preferred Traffic Flow Management Merging Two Flight Prioritization Concepts

This paper describes the methodology and results of a Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) simulation exercise that was conducted to study the integration of two concepts. The first concept, a credits based flight prioritization methodology, was integrated into the prototype System Enhancements for Versatile Electronic Negotiation (SEVEN) simulation environment. SEVEN is a concept that allows users to specify their trajectory and delay preferences by setting the relative trajectory cost for each trajectory. The purpose of the simulation was to study the impact of incorporating user preferences on delay incurred in an air traffic capacity-demand balancing situation. The users were asked to specify preferences at the flight level or at the trajectory level. Based on the experiment results, the combined SEVEN-credits concept allowed users to prioritize their flights and to distribute delays as per their preference.