Simulation-based Benefits and Costs Assessment of NASA's Airspace Technology Demonstration-2

This paper estimates the benefits and costs for an integrated arrival, departure, surface traffic management technology currently under operational evaluation at Charlotte Douglas International Airport. The technology under study is NASA's Airspace Technology Demonstration 2 (ATD-2) system. Using high-fidelity fast-time simulations of current-day operations (including modeling of current-day operational shortfalls) and future ATD-2 operations (including the modeling of associated ATD-2 benefit mechanisms), ATD-2 benefits were projected for three major U.S. airports. Individual airport benefits were then annualized (extrapolated to full year benefits) and nationalized (extrapolated to Core-30 FAA airports), to compute total projected monetary benefits per year. FAA-recommended cost assessment approaches were applied to compute projected ATD-2 implementation costs. Finally, costs were compared against National Airspace System (NAS)-wide benefits, and a projected return on investment was calculated. Our results estimate that the ATD-2 system can provide $2.6 billion in monetary benefits nationwide over the lifecycle of the program due to significant reduction in taxi delay as well as shifting of the delays from taxi to gate. The projected ATD-2 benefits significantly outweigh the projected implementation costs. Incorporation of ATD-2 into the FAA's planned Terminal Flight Data Manager (TFDM) system deployments is estimated to improve the benefit-cost ratio of the TFDM program from an earlier estimated 1.09 to 1.89 over the lifecycle of the program.