Evaluation of an Integrated Traffic Flow Management Decision Making Approach

Abstract

An integrated traffic flow management decision-making approach that sequentially schedules and reroutes flights subject to actual and forecast weather induced airspace capacity constraints is presented, and used to conduct 80 fast-time simulation experiments. These experiments considered variations in the severity and location of en route convective weather, and the traffic flow management strategies implemented to mitigate these weather impacts. Strategic flight scheduling, in which pre-departure and airborne delays were assigned to individual flights, was found to be effective at alleviating capacity constraints in sectors and at airports. However, tactical rerouting was found to be more effective than flight scheduling at avoiding en route weather hazards when the scheduling algorithms used weather impacted sector capacities as a proxy for weather location. In general, the distribution of the delays amongst the users was found to be most equitable when scheduling flights using a heuristic scheduling algorithm, such as ration-by-schedule. On the other hand, equity decreased by 77% when using a scheduling algorithm that took into account the number of seats aboard each flight. Interestingly, traffic flow management solutions that included scheduling and rerouting increased the equity of the solutions by 9% to 18% over comparable solutions that involved flight scheduling alone. Finally, the modeled results were compared with actual levels of delay, sector congestion and the number of weather incursions under three historical convective weather scenarios. The agreement between the modeled and actual results was found to be strongly dependent on the weather scenario and the number of constraints that were binding in the scheduling algorithm.