Enhanced Demand and Capacity Balancing based on alternative trajectory options and traffic volume hotspot detection

Abstract

Nowadays, regulations in Europe are applied at traffic volume (TV) level consisting in a reference location, i.e. a sector or an airport, and in some traffic flows, which act as directional traffic filters. This paper presents an enhanced demand and capacity balance (EDCB) formulation based on constrained capacities at traffic volume level. In addition, this approach considers alternative trajectories in order to capture the user driven preferences under the trajectory based operations scope. In fact, these alternative trajectories are assumed to be generated by the airspace users for those flights that cross regulated traffic volumes, where the demand is above the capacity. For every regulated trajectory the network manager requests two additional alternative trajectories to the airspace users, one for avoiding the regulated traffic volumes laterally and another for avoiding it vertically. This paper considers that the network manager allows more flexibility for the new alternative trajectories by removing restrictions in the Route Availability Document (RAD). All the regulated trajectories (and their alternatives) are considered together by the EDCB model in order to perform a centralised optimisation minimising the the cost deviation with respect to the initial traffic situation, considering fuel consumption, route charges and cost of delay. The EDCB model, based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), manages to balance the network applying ground delay, using alternative trajectories or both. A full day scenario over the ECAC area is simulated. The regulated traffic volumes are identified using historical data (based on 28th July of 2016) and the results show that the EDCB could reduce the minutes of delay by 70%. The cost of the regulations is reduced by 11.7%, due to the reduction of the delay, but also because of the savings in terms of fuel and route charges derived from alternative trajectories.