An Approach to Incorporating Demand Uncertainty in NAS-Wide Modeling
November 2007
William Baden, The MITRE Corporation
Glenn Foster, The MITRE Corporation
David Millner, The MITRE Corporation
George Solomos, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
The Federal Aviation Administration's
(FAA's) Operational Evolution Plan (OEP) was
initiated in 2000 as a 10-year plan to improve the
capacity of the National Airspace System (NAS).
MITRE/CAASD has supported the FAA in its
assessment of the OEP by using a discrete event
simulation of the NAS. Regular performance
assessments have provided point estimates of both
NAS-wide delays and airport delays. However, the
use of point estimates has limited the insight
decision-makers have about the amount of
uncertainty in the performance estimates of the
future NAS.
Some level of uncertainty in future
performance is driven by uncertainty in future
demand levels. Performance assessments have
used the FAA's official forecast, the Terminal Area
Forecast (TAF), as the basis for determining how
much growth to include in future demand. The
TAF is an annual publication that forecasts the
annual level of operations to be expected at over
3000 NAS airports. The most recent TAF, the 2005
TAF, forecasts yearly operation levels through
2025. TAF traffic level forecasts are based on
long-term forecasts of economic and demographic
data and are adjusted at the largest airports based on
factors particular to the airport.
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