CDM in Air Transport activity. It′s time to understand it !
Over the last few years, I have been involved in exciting conversations, with a number of ATM & Airport Specialists, from all over the world and I think this is probably the less understood and agreed subject, within air transport community, nowadays.
Let′s start by reminding people that CDM (Collaborative Decision Making) is not an aviation concept !
"The process of?collaborative decision making?is aimed at combining the input from all stakeholders and therefore at making the best choice from the standpoint of the objectivity. It is typical that decisions made by groups differ from those made by individuals. However, there is no clear indication that the group decisions are consistently better (or worse) than individual decisions. Also, collaborative decisions are apparently linked to group behaviors, interactions between members, role distribution, and psychological factors that can affect people's thinking"
So, CDM might be applied within a family, within a company or wherever multiple individuals (or groups of individuals) are both involved with, and affected by, decisions to be made.
The adoption of CDM for air transport operations has been proposed by ICAO on its Document 9971 (Manual on Collaborative Air Traffic Flow Management) which, amongst other things proposed that:
It is extremely important for those who propose to address CDM adoption, within air transport operations, to understand that apart from the beauty of the “Collaborate and Share Information” mantra, CDM operation is about individual/immediate sacrifices for the sake of collective/long term benefits.
Failing to understand there are concrete sacrifices, associated with any CDM initiative, within air transport environment, has been leading to major frustrations, operational chaos and financial losses.
Sooner or later, you will be assigned a CTOT or you will miss a TSAT window, and you will have to learn it, the hard way !
Another aspect of the CDM concept, which needs to be understood is that “collaborative decisions are apparently linked to group behaviors, interactions between members, role distribution, and psychological factors that can affect people's thinking”
What that means is that CDM programs designed by specialists of a given region, to be adopted at such region, based upon regional operational, administrative, cultural and behavioral aspects, with a lot effort, have good chances to work well, for that region !
At different regions, considerably different ways of implementing CDM concept, might be needed. There could be no better example than Eurocontrol′s and the FAA′s CDM experiences, over the last two decades.
It has not been an easy road for Eurocontrol and European stakeholders, to go all the way from ATCFM to the current existing versions of A-CDM, successfully implemented at some airports, while a number of others are still struggling to swallow the concept or have simply given up.
FAA′s life has not been any easier in United States with TFMS, TBFM, TFDM and ultimately Surface CDM (Airport CDM′s western brother).
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As one could expect, distributing sacrifices amongst different stakeholders with conflicting (quite often, competing) objectives, is not an easy task.
So, let′s be realistic !
If it′s hard for European and United States′ specialists, to reach common ground on CDM processes, for stakeholders operating within the same operational, administrative, cultural and behavioral environment, it′s simply unrealistic to expect any of such processes, can be simply cut and pasted wherever we want.
As ATM and Airport specialists from all over the world, improve their knowledge on CDM, learn with Eurocontrol′s and FAA′s mistakes and successes and engage more people in the assessment of their own operational, administrative, cultural and behavioral characteristics, multiple flavors of CDM processes will be wisely designed.
It′s absolutely critical that such processes interface with each other, with a view to provide full interoperability for all stakeholders.
But in my humble opinion, attempting to copy and paste CDM operational concepts, as if they were COTS products, replicable at any place, is both useless and foolish. ?
That′s not what real world is showing in Europe and United States; ??????
All of us, working in air transport environment, have surely heard, hundred times, things as:
Well there should be nothing new, then !
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