Principal Investigator R Hansman
There is an increasing emphasis on considering environmental objectives along with traditional objectives such as performance and cost for the design and operation of air transportation systems. Consequently, selecting the “best” or “optimal” design and operation of a system has become more challenging due to the need to resolve multiple, competing environmental-performance tradeoffs. In order to facilitate the development of methods to analyze air transportation system tradeoffs, a framework was developed in this research. The framework was applied to two test cases. The first case analyzes environmental-performance tradeoffs for aircraft cruise operations. And the second case analyzes the tradeoffs associated with using Required Area Navigation and Performance (RNAV/RNP) for approach procedures. In the analyses corresponding to these two cases, several important aspects of analyzing competing tradeoffs are considered. These include valuation theory, for quantifying a stakeholder’s relative preference amongst a set of tradeoffs, and hyperspace visualization, for identifying the most dominant tradeoffs.