Cost-Benefit Analysis
Mosaic has extensive experience in fast-time modeling and simulation to support FAA and NASA analysis efforts in evaluating concepts of operations, conducting performance assessments, and developing performance requirement specifications. Mosaic’s Modeling and Simulation Environment (MSE) has been used multiple times to inform investment decision-making in the NextGen era. MSE has been adapted for multiple airports and has been applied to assess Trajectory Based Operations (TBO) performance, determine benefits and define requirements for the Management by Trajectory concept, define and validate performance requirements for Terminal Flight Data Manager (TFDM), model benefits for Time Based Flow Management (TBFM), and evaluate the integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into the National Airspace System. Beyond MSE, Mosaic has experience in many fast-time simulation environments developed by FAA, NASA, and DOT. Our staff has applied them to various problems, including stochastic evaluation of new concepts, benefits analysis, concept development, and system-wide impact studies.
Projects
Operational Performance Assessment of Trajectory Based Operations:
Mosaic conducted an analysis focused on shifting delay from the arrival and descent phases of flight to above top of descent to reduce fuel burn and emissions. Our analysis considered the impact of scheduled time of arrival (STA) error, under various assumptions of STA conformance and various delay absorption profiles above top of descent, at the TRACON boundary and inside the TRACON, on total arrival delay. Given STA conformance assumptions and operational conditions, the analysis indicated the optimal tradeoff between total delay and delay inside the TRACON is achieved with the target TRACON delay set between three and five minutes.
TBFM in the Cloud:
As part of a project assessing potential TBFM functions and subsystems that could be migrated to the FAA Cloud Services (FCS) environment and could provide reusable enterprise services, Mosaic conducted a detailed analysis of Cloud infrastructure costs associated with several TBFM candidate architectures. We modeled TBFM communication/data throughput considering Cloud deployment, analyzed opportunities for cost-saving through elastic provisioning of Cloud infrastructure, and identified potential savings through adoption of COTS monitor and control software to replace 30% to 50% of proprietary software in the TBFM code base that creates excessive expense and dependence for the FAA on code that it does not own.