New Ways of Looking at Sector Demand and Sector Alerts

This report presents and analyzes new approaches for determining when a sector should be alerted by the Monitor Alert capability of the Traffic Flow Management System (TFMS). TFMS currently alerts a fifteen-minute interval for a sector if the demand for any minute in that interval exceeds the Monitor Alert Parameter (MAP). This method suffers from three problems: *The demand from a single minute does not adequately reflect controllers' workload for the entire 15-minute interval. *The alert status for an interval is unstable: it can frequently change with minute-by-minute TFMS updates. *The alerted interval depends on the arbitrary 15-minute boundaries. To deal with these problems, this report describes two new approaches for determining when a sector should be alerted, a deterministic demand pattern approach and a probabilistic approach.