Solving the European Air Traffic Flow Management Problem

The air traffic industry is a strategically important sector of the overall world economy. Although air travel is currently one of the economy’s sectors most affected by the COVID-19 epidemic, there is a general agreement among experts that the sector will recover. Indeed, all the major R & D programmes for modernizing the air transport systems around the world are continuing with their plan and long-term objectives, and perhaps even reinforcing the focus on resilient and network-based operations. One of the cornerstones of these initiatives is the implementation of the ICAO Trajectory Based Operations concept. Moreover, in the attempt of better satisfying airspace users’ business objective and enabling a more collaborative decision-making environment in the air traffic flow management decision process, the concept of trajectory preference has been widely discussed. In this talk, we present a novel data-driven optimization approach for air traffic flow management (ATFM). The proposed approach allows resolving demand-capacity imbalances while considering airspace users preferences. The model assigns a feasible 4D trajectory and a possible ground delay to each flight. The proposed approach has been tested on instances extracted from the Eurocontrol data repository. With more than 32000 flights considered, we solved the largest instances of the ATFM problem available in the literature in short computational times that are reasonable for practical application. As a by-product, we highlight the trade-off between preferences and delays as well as the potential benefit of the proposed approach. The proposed approach has the potential of becoming the main engine of air traffic flow management tools.