> Prize: A trophy with the winning university’s name, participating students’ names, and date of award will be displayed at an FAA facility, and a display copy of the trophy will be sent to the lead academic institution. The lead university will be presented with an award of $25,000 and finalist student will each receive a copy of the winning certificate.
...and quoting from FAA's FY 2023 budget submission[1]:
> For FY 2023, the FAA’s budget request of $18.6 billion represents an increase of 3.3 percent from the FY 2022 Continuing Resolution (CR) level. When combined with the $5 billion in advanced annual appropriations under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the total FY 2023 funding for FAA is $23.6 billion. This funding level allows the FAA to make continued investments to safeguard the most complex airspace in the world while transforming our aviation infrastructure.
It is an interesting idea to use these in mock-ups for the TFMS replacement as long as they were example and not hard HF/CHI requirements.
I would not trust college students with no experience in HF/CHI to create GUI requirements for a mission critical application like TFMS. While it is not safety critical, traffic flow management is mission critical.
Based on my interpretation of the post I think the FAA will probably select aspects from the various submissions they receive and try to incorporate them into their proposal requirements. So I do not think the students will exactly have a direct hand in the creation of FMDS, that will most likely be up to whatever company wins the contract (https://sam.gov/opp/a3e83f9e32d443b6bdd143ded9612916/view).
It's particularly insulting because no one could be bothered to come up with a useful, interesting problem description that is not loaded to the hilt with acronyms of systems that are only ever relevant to their current system:
> If the TFM strategy involves a GDP, AFP, or CTOP, FMDS allocates arrival slots for the constrained
resource to NAS users and computes Expect Departure Clearance Times (EDCTs) for all included flights
that are still on the ground.
While we are here... where on earth is the reference/demo data? How do they expect anyone to make a visualization going purely from verbose specs?
I worked on FAA systems for a while, mostly FDIO (Fight Data Input Output, aggravatingly pronounced Fido by controllers), where we couldn't even just refer to a monitor and keyboard as such, had to go and call them a RANK (Replaceable Alpha Numeric Keyboard) and CRT (in spite of them long since having moved away from Cathode Ray Tube technology)
Ha, I am not a controller but I have always called FDIO "Fido". Never heard of RANK or CRT though, probably to be expected since there are so many different systems in the NAS, each with its own unique terminology.
Design competitions are an extremely common way to facilitate job placement for students. It filters out the uninterested, develops skills, and connects employers with first-time job seekers. It costs almost nothing and everyone benefits. The work product is often irrelevant.
Others are griping about this being free labor but consider that often times these types of problems have already been contracted out to someone and have been in development for some time. They may not necessarily be recruiting students to give them a "freebie" but rather someone saw this could be a good learning experience for students and had enough follow through to make it happen. It makes a contact to a university, lets students get real world experience (and resume builders), and there's a little incentive.
Should some of that incentive go to the student(s)? Sure, but I imagine there's legal hoops that are a mess to jump through for that and winning != implementation. Like I said, they've probably got someone contracted for the task and the student could build a job opportunity to said company from it.
...and quoting from FAA's FY 2023 budget submission[1]:
> For FY 2023, the FAA’s budget request of $18.6 billion represents an increase of 3.3 percent from the FY 2022 Continuing Resolution (CR) level. When combined with the $5 billion in advanced annual appropriations under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the total FY 2023 funding for FAA is $23.6 billion. This funding level allows the FAA to make continued investments to safeguard the most complex airspace in the world while transforming our aviation infrastructure.
What a joke.
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2022-04/F...