Evaluation of Air Traffic Network Resilience: A UK Case Study

Abstract

With growing air travel demand, weather disruptions cost millions in flight delays and cancellations. Current resilience analysis research has been focused on airports and airlines, rather than the en-route waypoints, and has failed to consider the impact of disruption scenarios. This paper analyses the resilience of the United Kingdom (UK) air traffic network to weather events that disrupt the network’s high-traffic areas. A Demand and Capacity Balancing (DCB) model is used to simulate adverse weather and re-optimise the cancellation, delay, and rerouting of flights. The model’s feasibility and effectiveness were evaluated under 20 concentrated and randomly occurring extreme disruption scenarios, lasting 2 h and 4 h. The results show that the network is vulnerable to extended weather events that target the network’s most central waypoints. However, the network demonstrates resilience to weather disruptions lasting up to two hours, maintaining operational status without any flight cancellations. As the scale of disruption increases, the network’s resilience decreases. Notably, there exists a threshold beyond which further escalation in disruption scale does not significantly impair the network’s performance.