Cascade aircraft flows merging with multiple order changes

Abstract

Nowadays, the problem of safe aircraft flows merging is considered usually as one-stage. However, real air-route schemes assume often a tree-like structure when primary flows are merged at some points and the resultant flows are merged further. In this case, the safety of merging should be controlled not only at the final point, but also at some intermediate ones. With that, aircraft can change their order between these merge points by means of usage of holding areas and/or path alignments. In this paper, the authors suggest a mixed integer linear programming formalization of such a problem. The suggested procedure is realized as a computational program with the optimization Gurobi library. Results of numerical simulations are presented.