AbstractsTransportation

The current research focuses on Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) in Europe. When the capacity of either an airport or an en-route sector is expected to drop below demand or when demand is expected to exceed capacity, flow management measures must be taken. In Europe, the assignment of pre-departure delays is most frequently used to match the flow of air traffic with the capacity of the air transportation network. The required pre-departure delays are determined at the Network Management Operations Centre (NMOC) in Brussels, using a First Come First Serve (FCFS) slot assignment principle. FCFS is considered as a fair slot assignment method because the original scheduled order of flights is maintained. However, using FCFS does not necessarily result in the most cost-efficient assignment of pre-departure delays because larger network effects are not taken into account: if a flight is heavily delayed it may cause reactionary delays and transfer passengers may miss their connecting flights. Therefore, slot assignment methods that differ from the conventional FCFS principle may contribute to enhancing European ATFM. The National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) initiated a research track on ATFM to examine the use of innovative slot assignment methods. This research resulted in a prototype flow management tool that is able to perform flow management on a large scale European scenario by solving local imbalances between demand and capacity using assignment of pre-departure delays. Besides the possibility to apply conventional First Come First Serve (FCFS) slot assignment, the tool is also able to prioritise categories of flights. Disruption at major hub airports has a large impact on the operational efficiency of the complete air transportation network. Therefore, flights coming from and going to these airports may receive a high priority level to oppose these effects and alleviate the delay load at these airports. The rigid application of prioritisation ensures that flights with a prioritised status receive absolute precedence over non-prioritised flights. If a sector or airport is heavily congested and there are many priority flights, non-prioritised flights have a risk at receiving extra delayed slots. This may result in a high spread of delay among flights. To achieve a more balanced assignment of pre-departure delays, the effects of a weighted optimisation between prioritised flights and non-prioritised flights is studied. Therefore, in the current research study the existing prototype flow management tool is enhanced with an optimisation module that optimises the assignment of slots using linear programming in Cplex. The enhanced flow management tool is evaluated by processing a set of flights that represents a day of air traffic in 2008 in the core area of Europe. In addition, different levels of network-disruption are simulated by reducing the capacity of some major hub airports. Including the optimisation module in the existing tool results in a robust prototype flow management tool that is able to perform flow…