Flight Routing and Scheduling Under Departure and En Route Speed Uncertainty

Abstract

Demand uncertainty is one critical form of uncertainty which has an adverse effect on Air traffic flow management (ATFM). This is mainly due to the deviation in departure time and aircraft speed from their scheduled values. This may lead to the arrival of aircraft to certain routes at unscheduled times, causing an unexpected demand on those routes. The uncertainty of demand creates several difficulties in air transportation systems, including higher workloads for air traffic controllers, higher delays, travel costs, as well as safety risk. In this study, we propose a robust flight routing and scheduling scheme while considering both departure and speed uncertainty present in the air traffic network. Following robust optimization, we ensure that the capacity violations are eliminated from the system. The ATFM problem is formulated as a Mixed Integer Quadratic Programming (MIQP) problem with the objective of minimizing expected total delay of the system while maintaining required in-trail separation between aircraft even under uncertainty. In addition, we use an optimal flight level assignment method and speed assignment strategy to minimize the system delay and to fully utilize the system capacity. Furthermore, a greedy strategy with parallel computation is presented with the problem decomposed into a set of maximum independent sets to reduce the computational complexity in solving large-scale ATFM problems. With the experimental results, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the model.