NAS Integrated Collaborative Planning Service

NAS evolution points to different kinds of vehicles (e.g., UAS, on-demand mobility) operated by different kinds of organizations and individuals for different purposes. Currently, vehicles other than aircraft are accommodated in the NAS via manual licensing and planning processes or severe restrictions on acceptable operations. Ultimately, vehicle operators will demand access to airspace, which is a shared public resource. To date, most research has focused on vehicle characteristics and aggregate effects on NAS performance. There has been limited focus on planning needs of the various stakeholders involved in these operations or on envisioning a future NAS that supports collaborative operations planning for a wide variety of vehicles and operations. Planning systems need to evolve to support collaborative planning among all stakeholders' requirements and equitable access to the NAS for different kinds of vehicles used by different stakeholders for different missions that present different safety and planning challenges. Mosaic ATM proposes NICoPS, the NAS Integrated Collaborative Planning System, which works across vehicle types, missions, and planning time scales. Not only does it support a variety of vehicle operators, but it also support traffic management personnel in evaluating different vehicle operations proposals in the context of all other proposed operations, expanding their current capabilities beyond evaluating aircraft operations. It leverages Mosaic's SWIM Gateway and Mosaic Analytics Suite capabilities, among others, to facilitate data exchange and operations analysis. In Phase I, we propose to characterize different stakeholders' planning needs, and design the NICoPS prototype. We will implement the design into an early-stage NICoPS prototype sufficient for initial stakeholder evaluations in Phase II. In Phase II, we propose to iteratively enhance the NICoPS design and prototype, and carry out stakeholder evaluations including field evaluation.