Improved Method on Traffic Flow Optimization Ground Delay Program

Abstract

This article develops a flow model of high altitude traffic in the National Airspace System using an Eulerian description of the network with hyperbolic partial differential equations. Existence and uniqueness (well-posedness) of a solution to the system of partial differential equations on a network is established. Subsequently, an optimal control problem is studied with the junction coefficients as control variables. We use a fully discretised adjoint approach and we implement it on a network with 16 links and 5 junctions created from the enroute high altitude jetways between the Oakland and Salt Lake City air traffic control centers. The aircraft flows on the final link of the network with and without control are compared and the results demonstrate the efficiency of the method developed in the article.