Growing traffic volumes and new aaiss result in a continuing increase in flight movements. Busy airports and limited runway capacity, bottlenecks in the overall traffic scenario, and the lack of airspace capacity for approaching traffic have become common problems. As a result a large number of aircraft holding patterns need to be flown, there are frequent flight delays and air traffic controllers have to cope with a heavy workload. To overcome these problems the optimization of flow for arriving and departing traffic is required.

COMPAS helps to optimize the traffic flow

The advanced computer solution COMPAS (Computer Oriented Metering, Planning and Advisory System) – developed in cooperation with experienced air traffic controllers – performs the planning, scheduling and sequencing of the arriving traffic. ACC and APP controllers get validated advice on how to handle the large amount of arriving traffic. This results in an increase in safety and optimal use of airspace capacity, as the controllers have more time to deal with critical situations and may handle more traffic. Safefty regulations, as well as economic flight profiles, optimum use of airspace, weather and wake-vortex information, etc. are taken into planning consideration so that COMPASS assures a conflict-free approach with minimum delay resulting in optimal use of run-way capacities. So path stretching procedures and holding patterns are avoided as far as possible.

• Flight plan-, radar- and weather data

• Filtering of inbound traffic (if not provided by RDPS)

• Code/call sign correlation

• Use of “Base Of Aircraft Database” (BADA) for flight profile calculation

• Airport acceptance rate (changeable by APP controller)

• Airspace structure (sectorization, STARs, etc.)

• Fast and highly efficient optimization algorithm for sequence calculation