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h1. Goals

The main objective of the air traffic flow management is to optimize the use of the air space to cope with the increasing air traffic. Such optimization process takes into account a large number of data sources from multiple domains and of different kinds.


h1. Approach

There are static data, known as environment data, which describe the air space and the airports. Static data have a slow update cycle: 28 days.
There are dynamic events such as descriptions of flight plans, updates of flight positions, updates of the weather conditions, updates of the airport conditions or updates of the air traffic control conditions. Dynamic events have a frequent/fast update cycle.
The role of the air traffic flow management systems (e.g. CFMU in Europe) is to process multiple CEPs so as to generate meaningful (i.e. with added value for the operator) views of the dynamic events to help the optimization of one sector of the air space or one airport.
The newly created CEPs constitute the entries to further stages of optimization: consolidate the air traffic among the neighbour sectors, optimize flight routes per flight, etc.