Analysis of the airspace design trade space

• This paper outlines and demonstrates a methodology and computational framework to explore the trade-space underlying airspace design. • The methodology described here can also examine the assignment of agents to activities in properly controlled experiments that seek to isolate the effects of ‘function allocation’; at an extreme, the same activities may be done in all cases with only their distribution between agents varying. • This evaluation provides the ability to isolate the impact of specific airspace design variables while holding other technological aspects of the problem such as CDR algorithm applied or assumed communication bandwidth, to prevent confounds in the mapping of the airspace design trade space. • The methodology can be applied to both high-level and detailed design decisions since more focused design parameters can be examined and a wider space of nominal and off-nominal conditions can be simulated.