Evaluation of a Dynamic, Fast-Response Model for Airspace Capacity Windfalls

摘要

Severe weather necessitates strategic initiatives to restrict access to parts of the airspace. In these situations, control is exerted by defining a set of permissible slots and assigning flights to them while the weather persists. Several factors, including aircraft delay and early weather clearance, can lead to unexpected capacity in the affected airspace. For these situations we propose a fast-response model to identify flights that could best make use of these airspace capacity windfalls. During these strategic congestion management initiatives, some operators choose to fly an alternate route to avoid suffering the ground delay that accompanies a slot. The crux of this work lies in generating candidate paths to return these re-routed aircraft to their preferred routes if the realized capacity exceeds predictions. The benefits of using these candidate paths are estimated, and fed to an optimization model to identify flights that may best use this capacity. These models are applied to real data, using the FACET simulation tool, to estimate the benefits of a fast-response rerouting tool. This work provides valuable insight into the developing class of dynamic fast-response models for air traffic management, as well as aircraft route planning in the face of uncertainty. Additionally, it provides an important example of the integration of simulation and optimization models.