A dynamic approach for air traffic flow management of arriving aircraft at a congested airport

Abstract

Both the airline industry and air travelers have been pummeled by increased delays experienced at major airports and, as a result, rising operating costs. In this thesis, we focus on the dynamic Arrival Flow Management sub-process of the more general Congestion Management process at a given airport. We show the inefficiencies of a current approach, Miles-In-Trail, and present and evaluate a new approach which we have called Integrated Interactive Dynamic Flow Control (IIDFC). IIDFC produces a set of Traffic Flow Management Advisories which are dynamically updated. It integrates all types of Traffic Flow Advisories and is interactive in the sense that the set of advisories generated and actually issued can be modified by Traffic Flow Managers. Given the complexity of the overall flow management problem, a Traffic Flow Management Simulator was implemented as part of this thesis in order to evaluate various dynamic flow control strategies.