A spatial database for reroute planning

Current storage and retrieval of air traffic management data by the FAA allows for sufficient control of aircraft flows in the National Airspace System. However, these storage methods allow neither for deep historical analysis nor for use of advanced, standards-compliant tools. Another shortcoming of these storage methods is that air traffic management data are not readily accessible by all interested parties. The contributions of this paper are a new approach to describing, storing, and serving air traffic management data, and its software implementation. This approach is compliant with relevant published standards and, therefore, is easily incorporated into current and future systems. We fully develop a schema for describing reroute advisories, implement a database based upon that schema, then implement an example tool that can use this new system to provide information in a way not possible in the current system. This schema is an extension of the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model and allows for geometric queries to databases based upon the model. The example tool uses this feature by requesting previously implemented reroutes that do not intersect a supplied region of interest. The results enable a traffic manager to base a new reroute on past decisions of all traffic managers, which is not an approach used today. In today's operations, the sharing of past decisions between traffic managers given similar situations is not a formal process. The disconnect between what various managers might implement leaves room for inefficiencies in the system and helps motivate this study. As an example of the potential benefits of the system described here, there was a savings over 1000 nmi in total flight distance over all flights affected by a particular reroute advisory.