NextGen Stakeholder Valuation: Methodology for establishing and synchronizing business cases

"Making predictions is hard, especially about the future" observed Yogi Berra. Making predictions about the behavior of a highly complex system-of-systems with poorly understood emergent behavior, such as the National Airspace System (NAS), is all the more so. The U.S. aviation community has embarked upon a mission to transform itself to a vision of the next generation air transportation system (NextGen). In doing so, a range of challenges must be overcome encompassing operational, technical, and policy considerations. It is becoming widely recognized that a major set of challenges address the business considerations of a range of investing stakeholders who will need to spend billions of dollars to realize that transformation. The most daunting challenge is that these investments will need to be synchronized across a variety of commercial enterprises, government agencies, and other actors. This paper addresses the methodology for establishing and synchronizing business cases with a focus on formulation of alternate portfolios within the context of NextGen.