A Simultaneous Optimization Model for Airport Network Slot Allocation under Uncertain Capacity

Abstract

<jats:p>Serious congestion and delay problems exist in most of the busiest airports worldwide because of imbalance between scarce airport slot resources and increasing traffic demand. Various factors, especially weather conditions, exacerbate the demand–capacity imbalance. This paper presents a robust model for simultaneous slot allocation on an airport network in multiple calendar days, considering airport capacity uncertainty. The idea of robust optimization is conducive to sustainable and stable decision-making. Robustness is represented through reducing the potential scheduling conflicts in the worst case. Then the model links the strategic decisions and pre-tactical decisions in air traffic management (ATM) through the tradeoff between strategic discrepancy cost and operational congestion cost. Under the support of the Cplex solver, numerical analyses are taken to validate the characteristics and effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that the proposed model effectively eliminates the existing and potential scheduling conflicts, and makes effective tradeoffs between airline preference and potential airport congestion risk.</jats:p>

Community Detection for Air Traffic Networks and Its Application in Strategic Flight Planning

“…For this reason, twice a year, a Slot Coordination conference takes place principally to resolve conflicts stemming from the timing of slots allocated across multiple airports [33]. The current contributions that address the allocation of airport slots at the network level are based on very strong simplifications that severely limit their applicability-only for single days and not in series [34], with computer-generated instances under a number of severely simplifying assumptions [35], or considering a network composed of only 3 airports in southern China [36]. An appropriate decomposition of the network, as proposed in this work, could foster the development of optimisation models that limit the use of face-to-face and manually conducted negotiations, as is the case today in the Slot Coordination conference.…”

A Collaborative Optimization Method of Flight Slots Considering Fairness Among Airports

“…e results show that the model effectively eliminates existing and potential scheduling conflicts and balances the airline preference and potential airport crowded risk [22].…”

An Optimization Model for Flight Rescheduling from an Airport’s Centralized Perspective for Better Management of Demand and Capacity Utilization

“…Constraints (8) and (9) ensure that w arr it and w dep jt are non-increasing for each flight, consistently with their definition. Constraints (10) and (11) ensure that the aggregate number of scheduled arrivals and departures in each period t does not exceed the runway capacity limits. Constraint (12) defines the maximum of all positive and negative displacements for all incoming and outgoing flights, and finally, Constraint (13) defines the variables' type and sign constraints.…”

“…Improving airport capacity utilization is related to air traffic flow and capacity management (ATFCM), which tries to enhance the efficiency of operations by optimizing the allocation of airport resources for both arriving and departing aircrafts. Slot allocation is a key mechanism for achieving flowcapacity balance and dealing with airport congestion under airport-declared capacity constraints [11,12]. Many existing optimization models that are concerned with the effective use of runway systems have achieved increased utilization through the removal of slack times [8].…”