A method to design a tie-point-based optimized profile descent (OPD) solution

Air Traffic Management (ATM) related inefficiencies are causing important unnecessary expenses to airlines around the world. The long-term ATM paradigm shift led by SESAR and NextGen will require years and important investments before it brings its long-awaited benefits. New arrival and departure management tools, new systems to manage and share air-traffic-related information or innovations in the traffic flow management systems are some of the elements of the new system. While these future tools and concepts are under development, important efficiency improvements can be addressed in the short term with today's ATM paradigm and systems simply by introducing small changes in current practices or airspace designs. A good example of this is the FAA Tie-point Optimized Profile Descent (OPD) concept that leverages current standard air traffic controller practices to achieve significant fuel savings during the arrival phase. While not bringing the full benefits expected by the long-term ATM solutions, this concept has been successfully implemented in several US airports without the need of additional automation in the air or on the ground, and thus requiring almost no investment from Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs). To promote the use of this concept, this paper presents a method to design and optimize a Tie-point OPD solution for a generic airport. This optimization method is based on an iterative design process which is supported by fast-time air traffic simulations to maximize the statistical probability of completing an uninterrupted OPD in a given environment. Boeing's fast-time air traffic simulation tool ELASTic (Enterprise Library for Analysis and Simulation of Trajectories and Traffic) was used to conduct the fast-time simulation experiments in this paper. The tool was set up to have a good representation of the tie-point-based ATC function, and is equipped with validated aircraft performance and FMS models, as well as four-dimensional wind and temperature fields and their uncertainties.