The rate control index for traffic flow

The objective of Air Traffic Flow Management is to maintain safe and efficient use of airspace and airports by regulating the flow of traffic. In this paper, we introduce a single-valued metric for post-operatively rating the performance of achieved traffic flow against targeted traffic flow. We provide variations on the metric, one of which factors out stochastic conditions upon which a plan is formulated, and show how these improve on current traffic control analysis techniques. The core of the metric is intuitive and simple, yet leads to an interesting optimization problem that can be efficiently solved via dynamic programming. Numerical results of the metric are given as well as a sample of the type of analysis that should follow a low rating by the metric. Although this metric was originally developed to rate the performance of Ground Delay Programs, it is equally applicable to any setting in which the flow of discrete objects such as vehicles is controlled and later evaluated. ∗Robert Hoffman is a senior analyst with Metron Scientific Consulting, 11911 Freedom Drive, Reston VA 20190. Email: [email protected]. Michael Ball holds a joint appointment with the Robert H. Smith School of Business and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. Email: [email protected].