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The National Airspace Resource Investment Model (NARIM) is being developed jointly by the Investment Analysis and Operations Research Directorate which supports the FAA's Office of System Architecture and Investment Analysis (ASD) and NASA Interagency Integrated Product Team (IPT) for Air Traffic Management (ATM).

NARIM provides NASA and the FAA with the modeling and analysis capability to examine airspace concepts associated with future advances to the National Airspace System (NAS). The system is also being developed to provide a NAS perspective to the research and investment allocation process. In providing this perspective, NARIM is to include the modeling and analysis of current and potential operations, the engineering impacts of future systems and the ability to trade requirements across system and procedural investment alternatives.

The NARIM system consists of three interrelated parts:

• Operational modeling analyzes the movement of aircraft through the NAS to determine the impacts that new concepts, implemented through procedures and/or hardware, will have on the overall NAS performance.
• Architectural/Technical modeling provides a means of assessing how procedural/system changes affect the hardware/software components of the NAS infrastructure (both FAA and users). This is implemented through a series of executable engineering modeling capabilities.
• Investment analysis modeling provides the user with a methodology to cost effectively trade between alternatives for a system, trade requirements within a system and across system and procedural investment alternatives, trade between services to be provided/included into the NAS, balance risk, and assess the investment decision as a of part of a total research portfolio.

The Investment Analysis and Operations Research Directorate will be enhancing NARIM through several development activities as well as applying NARIM to perform several analyses that support the joint FAA and NASA Interagency IPT for ATM. Analysis that has been completed includes:

• Controller conflict resolution baseline study to provide a basis for comparison of the relative benefits of different conflict-resolution decision aids for controllers.
• Nation-wide conflict resolution benefits study to assess the rough-order-of-magnitude, NAS-wide benefits of a future strategic conflict-resolution tool.
• Cockpit Display of Traffic Information (CDTI) requirements analysis and benefits study to assess the viability and potential benefits of airborne self-separation through the use of CDTI given the spatial and temporal density shifts that occur in the NAS under today's and future concepts of operations.

The following NARIM tools are in use:

• Find Crossing - Mapping of trajectories to sectors and airspace restrictions. It is used analyze sector loading, throughput, and conflict analysis.
• Total Traffic Tool - An extension of Find Crossings, it is used to analyze potential conflicts and characteristics of conflicts. These are indications of conflict's complexity.
• ETMS Parser - A tool used to parse ETMS data. The messages of interest are "filed flight plans with amendments" and "as flown flight plans." The data is then used by other analysis tools and simulation models.
• Optimized Trajectory Generator (OPGEN) - OPGEN produces 4-D flight trajectories for user specific FMS cost indices based on winds aloft and active Special Use Airspace (SUA). The trajectories generated by OPGEN are used as inputs to other analysis tools or simulation models.

For additional information, go to the the Investment Analysis and Operations Research Directorate web site: Operations Research & Investment Analysis Division

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