In FAA's Combined Trajectory Options Program (CTOP) flight operators submit a set of possible routes (TOS—Trajectory Options Set) that the airline is willing to take for a given flight, if there is a flow constraint present in the air space. The airline tells the command center, which trajectectories it prefers by assigning a relative trajectory cost (RTC) to each route, which tells the command center how much ground delay the airline is willing to take to get a certain route.
My questions are - how do dispatchers determine how much RTC to assign to each route? What are the main things that they consider? Is there some kind of software that allows to calculate that, or is the process relatively informal and intuitive?