Over the ten years that TMS has been used, Volpe Center staff have worked closely with FAA personnel to improve the tools contained in the system, such as Monitor Alert, used to provide early warning of potential areas of congestion in the airspace. Recently, the Center's staff developed a new set of improvements to Monitor Alert to permit local adaptation of the airspace, referred to as profiles.
Profiles improve the modeling of flight trajectories during the ascent and descent phases of flight.
Two air traffic managers from the Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center visited the Volpe Center earlier this summer. Their feedback on the new tailored profiles for Monitor Alert was extremely positive. In addition, they are planning to provide additional profiles to raise the success rate further and may also provide tailored ascent profiles. GDPs are traffic management actions utilized during periods of severe weather, such as the recent national thunderstorm activity, which directly affected safety of air traffic operations. Successful execution of GDPs depends on uninterrupted TMS Hubsite operations to reallocate flight slots and departure times and to send data to FAA and airlines.