Recent years have witnessed a flourishing aviation industry as global air traffic continues to increase with scheduled airlines, general aviation activities, unmanned vehicles, and military aircraft alike. Just in the U.S. alone, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) provides air traffic service to more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million scheduled airline passengers traveling within the National Airspace System (NAS). The day-to-day activities of managing this increasing complexity with the movement of air transportation, coupled with an expected doubling of air traffic operations over the next ten years, will place unprecedented safety and capacity demands on the NAS. To meet these challenges, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), FAA, and industry have long introduced research initiatives aimed at developing advanced technologies and capabilities that can dramatically improve safety, efficiency, and capacity in the future NAS. However, as new operational capabilities are being introduced through modernization efforts such as the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), maintaining air operations safety in such a dynamic and growing environment becomes even more challenging.
We put forth a novel innovative approach that enhances weather situational awareness (WSA) for NAS stakeholders called WISE – the Weather Intelligence Support Environment for aviation operations. WISE is a multi-agent system (MAS) decision support application that continuously monitors multiple planned flights for all phases of flight. WISE will acquire current and forecast weather data relevant to the flight route, factor in variables interdependent with the weather (aircraft performance data, regulations, airport data, pilot limitations), and provide NAS stakeholders with alerts and notifications on aircraft at risk in response to current and forecast weather events.
NASA (Aviation Systems Division) is one of several U.S. government agencies that play a crucial role in helping to develop and implement the NextGen program by developing advanced automation concepts and technologies that provide NAS stakeholders (air traffic controllers, pilots, and other airspace users) with more accurate real-time information on air traffic flow, weather, and routing. The proposed innovation directly supports NASA’s ongoing research and development efforts in the area of air traffic management.
A commercial version of the innovation will serve as an autonomous flight dispatch service for stakeholders in the general aviation (GA) community by monitoring flights and providing enhanced weather decision support similar to flight dispatch services found in airline operational control centers – a service not readily in the GA community.