We provide a concept of operations and a corresponding implementation of a long-range air traffic flow management in the Asia-Pacific region. This management will provide an appropriate demandcapacity balancing considering both aircraft sequencing by local arrival management procedures and flow optimization to prevent over-demand in the approach area around the airport. Thus, coordination of longrange international flights demands collaboration between different flight information regions and local regulations. As Singapore Changi Airport is a central element of the Asia-Pacific flow management high share of long-haul air traffic, we use this airport to demonstrate our approach. To derive the operational conditions and actual traffic patterns at the airport, ADS-B messages and flight plan information are processed. The data are cleaned, analyzed, and filtered to provide information about arrival flows within given distances to the airport. We provide an efficacy analysis of the long-range air traffic flow management using two approaches. First, we applied a mixed-integer optimization of time shifts of normal distributed flight times. Here, the regulation of long-range flights by time shifts (e.g., achieved by speed advisories) shows a significant relief from periods of over-demand at the airport approach sector. Second, we implement a reference and a test case scenario in an agent-based simulation environment including the local arrival management procedures. Here, the number of holdings and the associated holding time could be reduced by at least 26%.
The increasing need for dynamic in-flight adjustments of a trajectory allows the airport, air traffic control and the airline a high degree of flexibility in terms of in-flight execution. This concept enables numerous optimisation options to jointly meet the requirements of sustainable air transport to increase economic and ecological efficiency, as well as safety. One promising measure is to control the aircraft arrival rate to prevent over-demand in the approach sector around the airport. In so-called Long-Range Air Traffic Management, the arrival time of long-haul flights, in particular, is already controlled many hours before arrival. However, the control options and their effects on arrival time and fuel burn are heavily dependent on flight performance and the (hardly predictable) influence of the weather. In this study, we optimize the arrival time of 26 long-haul flights in the Asia-Pacific region with arrival at Changi Airport within a peak hour considering the arrival rate of medium-haul and short-haul flights. This control is done by speed adjustments and by choosing alternative routes. For the first time, we model each long-haul flight and its control options individually in real weather conditions. We found that speed adjustments should start three to four hours before arriving at the approach sector to maximize the fuel-saving potential of small deviations from the optimal cruising speed, considering the predictability of the arrival time under real weather conditions. Allowing the aircraft to additionally choose an alternative lateral route, different from the filed flight plan, both maximizes the potential for harmonization of the number of aircraft in the approach sector and minimizes the total fuel burn. Unlike speed adjustments, alternative routes changes are effective even during the last hour of the cruise phase.
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