Effectiveness of Aircraft Inter-Arrival Control in Upstream Traffic Flow via a Combined Tandem Fluid Queue Model and Integer Programming Approach

Abstract

Conventionally, several studies indicated that controlling aircraft arrival time in the enroute airspace mitigates arrival aircraft congestion in the terminal airspace. Further research is required to clarify how to leverage this idea to design an air traffic management system, a so-called Extended Arrival MANager (E-AMAN), to reduce the arrival traffic flow while assisting air traffic controllers and boosting their effectiveness quantitatively. Under these circumstances, this research proposed aircraft inter-arrival time control within the en-route airspace and clarified its effectiveness in reducing arrival delay based on mathematical modeling and simulation evaluations. In this paper, we developed the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">G_t/GI/s_t</i> + <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">GI</i> tandem fluid model to analyze the time-varying delay time of flights in both en-route and terminal airspace and demonstrated the effect of inter-arrival time control in the upstream arrival traffic flow in the en-route airspace, combining the model with the nonlinear integer programming problem. The calculation results for 3,074 aircraft over 21 days, arriving at Tokyo International Airport between 17:00 and 22:00, show the possibility for the control to reduce the mean and maximum delay time for flights by 18.8% (5.0 s) and 16.5% (37.6 s) on average within the en-route airspace. Moreover, fast-time simulation by AirTOP is conducted to validate the control, revealing the scope to reduce mean and maximum delay times in the terminal airspace by 11.5% (36.5 s) and 19.2% (148.8 s) on average.