NASA AMES awards contract to NEXTOR to support air traffic management research

The University of Maryland and the National Center of Excellence for Aviation Operations Research (NEXTOR) are part of the Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) team, which has been chosen as one of the two winning contractors on the "Air Traffic Management System, Development, and Integration" solicitation recently awarded by the NASA Ames Research Center.

The CSC team included three of NEXTOR's industry partners: Boeing, Honeywell/Allied Signal and the Logistics Management Institute (LMI). The NEXTOR proposal effort was led by Professor Michael Ball of the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) at the University of Maryland.

One of the three designated research areas for this solicitation was Collaborative Decision Making (CDM). CDM is a principal research area at NEXTOR and NEXTOR's CDM project is led by Professor Michael Ball (Robert H. Smith School of Business/ISR).The goals of CDM are to improve air traffic management by applying the principles of information sharing and distributed decision making. The initial implementations of CDM have created decision support tools and a communications infrastructure that allows the Airline Operational Control Centers (AOCs) to share traffic flow management and resource allocation responsibilities with FAA traffic flow managers.

Work on the NASA project will proceed through specific performance-based task orders. The total value of all work is not to exceed $150 million.

Published March 30, 2000