Description: NAS evolution points to different kinds of vehicles (e.g., UAS, on-demand mobility) operated by different kinds of organizations and individuals for different purposes. Currently, vehicles other than aircraft are accommodated in the NAS via manual licensing and planning processes or severe restrictions on acceptable operations. Ultimately, vehicle operators will demand access to airspace, which is a shared public resource. To date, most research has focused on vehicle characteristics and aggregate effects on NAS performance. There has been limited focus on planning needs of the various stakeholders involved in these operations or on envisioning a future NAS that supports collaborative operations planning for a wide variety of vehicles and operations. Planning systems need to evolve to support collaborative planning among all stakeholders' requirements and equitable access to the NAS for different kinds of vehicles used by different stakeholders for different missions that present different safety and planning challenges. Mosaic ATM proposes NICoPS, the NAS Integrated Collaborative Planning System, which works across vehicle types, missions, and planning time scales. Not only does it support a variety of vehicle operators, but it also support traffic management personnel in evaluating different vehicle operations proposals in the context of all other proposed operations, expanding their current capabilities beyond evaluating aircraft operations. It leverages Mosaic's SWIM Gateway and Mosaic Analytics Suite capabilities, among others, to facilitate data exchange and operations analysis. In Phase I, we propose to characterize different stakeholders' planning needs, and design the NICoPS prototype. We will implement the design into an early-stage NICoPS prototype sufficient for initial stakeholder evaluations in Phase II. In Phase II, we propose to iteratively enhance the NICoPS design and prototype, and carry out stakeholder evaluations including field evaluation.

Benefits: The proposed SBIR will complete work that is highly beneficial to NASA - work that can directly benefit NASA's research into integration of on-demand mobility vehicles and UAS into the NAS, as well as its space vehicle operations. While NASA has been a leader in these areas of research, our effort will provide validated, centralized documentation of multiple stakeholders' planning needs, as well as the NICoPS capability that can be used to evaluate different vehicle mission concepts in the context of NAS planning operations. This can drive new vehicle and airspace concepts. At the end of Phase III, the NICoPS will be available for use by NASA personnel responsible for planning missions by various vehicles.

Beyond NASA, the primary potential applications for this work are with the FAA, vehicle operators, and the research communities associated with various vehicles. As new types of vehicles, such as on-demand mobility vehicles, become feasible, the capability will be available for those operators as well. At the end of Phase II, the NICoPS concept and prototype will be mature enough for transition to the FAA for further concept and system development. The NICoPS will provide a mechanism by which various vehicle operations can be evaluated and negotiated in the context of NAS operations, significantly reducing the amount of work that must be performed manually. Simultaneously, researchers associated with new vehicle types can use the NICoPS concept and prototype to support their efforts to design their vehicles for integration into NAS operations. At the end of Phase III, a prototype NICoPS SWIM service will be developed and available to demonstrate the capability to the commercial market.