Developing a real-time monitoring and alerting capability for traffic flow management

This paper describes the development of a real-time composite interactive display suite or “dashboard” capability for monitoring and alerting significant National Airspace System (NAS) events. The dashboard is designed to address the operational needs of air traffic managers in gathering data from multiple sources, thus gaining situational awareness of the NAS status. It monitors several system performance areas in real-time and identifies alerting events, pushing to the user relevant information and notifications regarding evolving problems. (“Pushing” information on a display means autonomous presentation - no query or other interrogation by the user is required.) While high-level system alerts are provided, drill-down information is also available for the user to determine whether further actions are warranted. The dashboard also allows the user to customize the alerts for a specific context by setting thresholds. Field evaluation results suggest that the dashboard capability shortens traffic managers' data acquisition time and, since the dashboard capability is a shared web application, it improves common situational awareness on NAS operations. Ongoing research focuses on calibrating alert thresholds for site-specific needs and expanding the selection of performance metrics enabled by System Wide Information Management feeds.