Digital Assistant for Arrival Scheduling with Conflict Prevention Capabilities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The work presented in the paper contains interesting concept of a digital assistant intended as “a specialized intelligent artificial agent that helps users to do their activities” as an “intermediary between humans and other agents in a multi-agent environment”, whose further development in the context of expectations related to the digitization of air traffic management justifies the need for its publication. Nevertheless, there are a few comments suggested to improve the manuscript:

· The paper’s readability should be improved, especially its scientific contribution should be emphasized. What is its purpose and is its scientific problem addressed by this paper? The phrase: “The spacing and scheduling problem aims to develop a scheduler minimizing the times of arrivals or their delays with respect to the schedule, maximizing in this way the runway throughput in compliance with the safety and operational constraints.” is not enough. So, could you state it more formally?

·       The presented concept of a digital assistant is very similar to the techniques implementing the concepts of a digital twin (DT). In the presented work, however, there are no references to DT, there is also a lack of relevant literature, such as:

Digital Twin as a Decision Support Tool for Airport Traffic Control,

10.1109/ITMS51158.2020.9259294

Airport Digital Twins for Resilient Disaster Management Response, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.03739

A Digital Twin-Based Platform towards Intelligent Automation with Virtual Counterparts of Flight and Air Traffic Control Operations, 10.3390/app112210923

·       A similar remark concerns the lack of a deeper discussion of the developed tool, i.e., ACOP. All information boils down to indicating the assumptions made: no wind, and a standard atmosphere.  It is worth noting that proactive planning should take into account weather forecasts (in particular the strength and direction of the wind). In an appropriate discussion, it is worth referring to the literature on the topic, such as: 

Proactive-Reactive Approach to Disruption-Driven UAV Routing Problem,

10.1007/978-3-031-25844-2_5

·       What are the advantages and what are the shortcomings of the presented approach? Could you comment them? Could you compare your solution to one of the already used in practice?

·       It is worth pointing out the main findings, emphasizing their practical and theoretical importance.

·       The short discussion about the expected benefits following from the proposed approach, e.g. regarding an expected profits estimation, should be also added.

The work presented in the paper contains interesting concept of a digital assistant intended as “a specialized intelligent artificial agent that helps users to do their activities” as an “intermediary between humans and other agents in a multi-agent environment”, whose further development in the context of expectations related to the digitization of air traffic management justifies the need for its publication. Nevertheless, there are a few comments suggested to improve the manuscript:

· The paper’s readability should be improved, especially its scientific contribution should be emphasized. What is its purpose and is its scientific problem addressed by this paper? The phrase: “The spacing and scheduling problem aims to develop a scheduler minimizing the times of arrivals or their delays with respect to the schedule, maximizing in this way the runway throughput in compliance with the safety and operational constraints.” is not enough. So, could you state it more formally?

·       The presented concept of a digital assistant is very similar to the techniques implementing the concepts of a digital twin (DT). In the presented work, however, there are no references to DT, there is also a lack of relevant literature, such as:

Digital Twin as a Decision Support Tool for Airport Traffic Control,

10.1109/ITMS51158.2020.9259294

Airport Digital Twins for Resilient Disaster Management Response, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.03739

A Digital Twin-Based Platform towards Intelligent Automation with Virtual Counterparts of Flight and Air Traffic Control Operations, 10.3390/app112210923

·       A similar remark concerns the lack of a deeper discussion of the developed tool, i.e., ACOP. All information boils down to indicating the assumptions made: no wind, and a standard atmosphere.  It is worth noting that proactive planning should take into account weather forecasts (in particular the strength and direction of the wind). In an appropriate discussion, it is worth referring to the literature on the topic, such as: 

Proactive-Reactive Approach to Disruption-Driven UAV Routing Problem,

10.1007/978-3-031-25844-2_5

·       What are the advantages and what are the shortcomings of the presented approach? Could you comment them? Could you compare your solution to one of the already used in practice?

·       It is worth pointing out the main findings, emphasizing their practical and theoretical importance.

·       The short discussion about the expected benefits following from the proposed approach, e.g. regarding an expected profits estimation, should be also added.

Author Response

Thanks for the comments. Please find in the upload file the document reporting point by point the comments and iur answer.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Please see the document attached

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thanks for the comments. Please find in the uploaded file the document reporting point by point the comments and our response. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

It is a pity that the concepts of "digital" assistant" and  "digital twin" where not discussed in depth.