Abstract
The purpose of this is to guide the SESAR primary projects in assessing the impact of any automated planning tools on the flexibility of the aviation system, with a focus on the flexibility to introduce changes after the planning cycle is complete. In other words, it should help to assess whether the planning capabilities that automated decision support tools offer will limit flexibility in the execution phase if those plans need to change. Analysing such planning/flexibility trade-offs involved modelling the future ATM operations envisioned in SESAR, instantiating those models in a set of scenarios, discussing all the materials with experts, and then building a list of important issues from those discussions. We then abstracted out of those issues a general checklist for avoiding such trade-offs.
