EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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1891. Stochastic Dynamic Models for Reducing Air Traffic Delays at Heathrow

Invited abstract in session MC-55: Airline Applications I, stream Transportation.

Monday, 12:30-14:00
Room: S02 (building: 101)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Rob Shone
Management Science, Lancaster University
2. Jamie Fairbrother
Department of Management Science, Lancaster University

Abstract

Imbalances between demand and capacity at the world’s busiest airports cause air traffic delays, which can have serious financial and environmental consequences. To alleviate the burden on runway capacity, various types of interventions are possible. At the pre-tactical stage (up to a few hours before a day of operations), the schedule can be adjusted by imposing ground delays on flights in order to avoid “hotspots” of delay occurring at peak times. At the tactical stage (during the day of operations itself), sequencing of take-offs and landings can be optimised in order to minimise average time separations between runway movements.

This talk will discuss the progress of an EPSRC-funded project (EP/X039803/1) aimed at integrating pre-tactical and tactical interventions in order to reduce air traffic delays at Heathrow Airport. We formulate a stochastic dynamic optimisation problem in which the “system state” at any given time includes hundreds of variables evolving via continuous-time stochastic processes. Solution approaches via approximate dynamic programming are possible in theory, but very difficult to implement in practice. Instead we consider an approach based on the emerging field of “simheuristics”, which involves continuously simulating possible trajectories of future random events and using a ranking and selection method to jointly optimise both runway sequencing and ground holding delay decisions.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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