National Airspace System (NAS) Traffic Flow Management (TFM) Collaboration: Building Collaboration into Dashboard Design

Today's National Airspace System (NAS) Traffic Flow Management (TFM) collaboration tools developed for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are not sufficient to meet the trajectory based operations (TBO) needs of the future, namely, real time data sharing, user collaboration, and improved strategic traffic management planning. To more efficiently and effectively collaborate among NAS stakeholders and across all TFM automation systems, The MITRE Corporation (MITRE)'s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) is researching a common dashboard to facilitate more complex TFM collaborative decision-making needs. A common visualization dashboard will be dynamic and data-driven to provide detailed information and meet the identified collaboration requirements so that stakeholders can work together in real-time across multiple facilities to formulate solutions to complex, multi-faceted problems. To that end, we have researched existing methods for improving collaboration and identified the principles and best practices of collaborative dashboard design to apply to NAS TFM scenarios. This research helps inform a future mode of operation that focuses on the collaborative process between FAA and flight operators, instead of simply providing situation awareness via monitoring and alerting. A common web-based platform to support decision making and record actions will enable more effective collaboration among TFM stakeholders. We analyzed the collaboration between the FAA and flight operators for an example scenario, as a first step toward defining the features needed to facilitate those interactions. To support collaborative decision-making, we envision a composable frontend for a NAS TFM problem-specific view or workspace.