Modeling And Optimization Of Air Traffic

This book combines the research activities of the authors, both of whom are researchers at Ecole Nationale de l’Aviation Civile (French National School of Civil Aviation), and presents their findings from the last 15 years. Their work uses air transport as its focal point, within the realm of mathematical optimization, looking at real life problems and theoretical models in tandem, and the challenges that accompany studying both approaches. The authors’ research is linked with the attempt to reduce air space congestion in Western Europe, USA and, increasingly, Asia. They do this through studying stochastic optimization (particularly artificial evolution), the sectorization of airspace, route distribution and takeoff slots, and by modeling airspace congestion. Finally, the authors discuss their short, medium and long term research goals. They hope that their work, although related to air transport, will be applied to other fields, such is the transferable nature of mathematical optimization. At the same time, they intend to use other areas of research, such as approximation and statistics to complement their continued inquiry in their own field. Contents 1. Introduction. Part 1. Optimization and Artificial Evolution 2. Optimization: State of the Art. 3. Genetic Algorithms and Improvements. 4. A new concept for Genetic Algorithms based on Order Statistics. Part 2. Applications to Air Traffic Control 5. Air Traffic Control. 6. Contributions to Airspace Sectorization. 7. Contribution to Traffic Assignment. 8. Airspace Congestion Metrics. 9. Conclusion and Future Perspectives. About the Authors Daniel Delahaye works for Ecole Nationale de l’Aviation Civile (French National School of Civil Aviation) in France. Stéphane Puechmorel works for Ecole Nationale de l’Aviation Civile (French National School of Civil Aviation) in France.

Due to a soaring air travel growth in the last decades, air traffic management has become increasingly challenging. As a consequence, planning tools are being devised to help human decision-makers achieve a better management of air traffic. Planning tools are divided into two categories, strategic and tactical. Strategic planning generally addresses a larger planning domain and is performed days to hours in advance. Tactical planning is more localized and is performed hours to minutes in advance. An aggregate route model for strategic air traffic flow management is presented. It is an Eulerian model, describing the flow between cells of unidirectional point-to-point routes. Aggregate routes are created from flight trajectory data based on similarity measures. Spatial similarity is determined using the Frechet distance. The aggregate routes approximate actual well-traveled traffic patterns. By specifying the model resolution, an appropriate balance between model accuracy and model dimension can be achieved. For a particular planning horizon, during which weather is expected to restrict the flow, a procedure for designing airborne reroutes and augmenting the traffic flow model is developed. The dynamics of the traffic flow on the resulting network take the form of a discrete-time, linear time-invariant system. The traffic flow controls are ground holding, pre-departure rerouting and airborne rerouting. Strategic planning---determining how the controls should be used to modify the future traffic flow when local capacity violations are anticipated---is posed as an integer programming problem of minimizing a weighted sum of flight delays subject to control and capacity constraints. Several tests indicate the effectiveness of the modeling and strategic planning approach. In the final, most challenging, test, strategic planning is demonstrated for the six western-most Centers of the 22-Center national airspace. The planning time horizon is four hours long, and there is weather predicted that causes significant delays to the scheduled flights. Airborne reroute options are computed and added to the route model, and it is shown that the predicted delays can be significantly reduced. The test results also indicate the computational feasibility of the approach for a planning problem of this size.

Dealing with a wide range of topics and covering different aspects of current importance in ATM, the papers place particular emphasis on automation and application of mathematical models and computational algorithms for ATM systems. The volume thus offers readers a summary of recent progress in such important areas as new operational concepts for automated ATM, evolution of traffic characteristics, ground-holding algorithms, ATC simulation facilities and a number of other aspects of ATC flow management.

Finally, we present three stochastic integer programming models for managing inbound air traffic flow of an airport, when there is adverse weather impacting the arrival capacity of the airport along with its arrival fixes. These are the first models, for optimizing ATFM decisions, which address uncertainty of future capacities of multiple NAS resources.

Air Traffic Management involves many different services such as Airspace Management, Air Traffic Flow Management and Air Traffic Control. Many optimization problems arise from these topics and they generally involve different kinds of variables, constraints, uncertainties. Metaheuristics are often good candidates to solve these problems. The book models various complex Air Traffic Management problems such as airport taxiing, departure slot allocation, en route conflict resolution, airspace and route design. The authors detail the operational context and state of art for each problem. They introduce different approaches using metaheuristics to solve these problems and when possible, compare their performances to existing approaches

This book highlights issues related to the organization and improvement of the efficiency of training system in technical operation of radio-electronic equipment currently used in civil aviation. The increasing intensity of air traffic around the world leads to a quantitative increase in old problems and the emergence of qualitatively new ones that can only be solved by trained people, whose training process should be carried out on a systematic basis. Modern approaches to improving the human resources potential of civil aviation, as a rule, are based only on modernizing the management mechanisms of the training system. One of the main advantages of this book is the unique integrated approach to building a system for training aviation personnel in the field of technical operation of radio-electronic equipment and air traffic control, which consists in taking into account various factors that affect the training of specialists, promising areas of development of civil aviation based on the analysis of various guidance documents and the construction of mathematical models that give a qualitative assessment of existing methods and the proposed new methodology. The book contains a large amount of visual illustrative material showing the existing structure of the system of training in the field of civil aviation.

&Quot;This proceedings contains 31 papers from the International Conference on Airport Modeling and Simulation held on August 17-20, 1997, in Arlington, Virginia. The papers cover many areas of aviation simulation and modeling, including air traffic management, airport ground traffic, terminal design and operations, planning, forecasting, financing, and environmental studies."--BOOK JACKET.