Robust Analytics, Inc. SBIR Phase II Award, June 2020

The Operational Risk Coordination Assistant (ORCA) offers an integrated data and advanced analytics solution to provide airlines and the FAA with models to predict potential operational risks to flight operations into high-traffic airports. We define operational risk from the airline perspective as the likelihood that flights will be delayed, re-routed, or cancelled due to weather, congestion, and FAA decisions. Using algorithms based on analysis of historical data and current weather and forecasts, ORCA generates conditional capacity probabilities and combines them with airline cost data to define the possible scenarios and quantify the expected cost of airline actions under the possible outcomes. nbsp;ORCA will provide airlines with an improved ability to predict possible operational conditions at destination airports, allowing them to build better plans and manage their network operations to improve on-time performance, customer satisfaction, and assist the FAA in matching demand to available capacity. Our tool provides a guide for airlines to make decisions under uncertainty, estimating the expected costs of different actions for a set of possible outcomes. For the FAA, ORCA offers a tool to integrate multiple factors into a probabilistic assessment of ever-changing conditions and their potential impact on flight safety and efficiency.Our concept aims to support airlines operating in an environment in which they collaborate with the FAA to define objectives, share constraint information, develop plans, and share responsibility in the execution. In that vision, operators require the ability to predict with greater accuracy than today what the operating conditions and constraints will be over the next several hours. Improved predictive capability will enable airlines to build more flexible plans and prepare alternatives should operating conditions change.