Future Concepts for Collaborative Traffic Flow Management in the National Airspace System

Because of its cognitive complexity, the responsibility for operating the National Airspace System (NAS) is distributed among many organizations and individuals. An understanding of how this distributed work system functions requires consideration not only of the allocation of control and responsibility, but also of the distribution of data, knowledge, processing capacities and characteristics, goals and priorities. It further requires consideration of how alternative architectures for distributing work (as defined by these different dimensions) impact performance on different types of tasks. Given such a distributed system, one of the most significant challenges is how to plan at a system level, in the face of uncertainty about critical NAS conditions, where the level of uncertainty changes over time. In this paper, a number of concepts for distributing responsibility in the NAS in order to better deal with uncertainty will be discussed, focusing on the need to allocate responsibility so that it better matches access to the knowledge and data necessary to make effective decisions to maintain capacity, safety and equality