Abstract
Most of the busiest airports worldwide experience serious congestion and delay problems which call for some immediate capacity and demand management action. Solutions aiming to manage congestion through better slot scheduling have lately received a great deal of consideration due to their potential for delivering quick and substantial capacity utilisation improvements. A slot scheduling approach brings promises to cope better with congestion problems in the short to medium run and in a more sustainable way based on existing resources. This paper aims to provide a critical review of current research in declared capacity modelling and strategic slot scheduling. Furthermore, it goes beyond the critical review of current research developments by identifying future research issues and gaps and developing concrete directions towards modelling and solving advanced single airport and network-based slot scheduling problems. Our research findings suggest that the next generation of slot scheduling models should explore variations of currently used objectives (e.g., alternative expressions of schedule delay) and most importantly enrich them with fairness and equity, resource utilisation and environmental considerations. Future modelling efforts should also aim to further investigate airlines’ utility of alternative slot allocation outcomes, including various acceptability measures and levels of tolerance against schedule displacements. Last but not least, future research should intensively focus on the development and validation of computationally viable and robust slot scheduling models being able to capture the complexity, dynamic nature and weather-induced uncertainty of airport operations, along with hybrid solution approaches being able to deal with the size and complexity of slot allocation at network level.
Highlights
Air transport plays a significant role for the European economy since it transports 8.8 % of passengers (575 billion pkm) and 0.1 % of freight (3 billion tkm), representing 22.8 % of EU27 trade by value with the rest of the world (748 billion Euros) in 2011 (European Commission 2013)
We aim to identify open issues and gaps that should be further investigated in future research with the main emphasis placed on the two most prominent research themes: (i) single-airport slot scheduling and (ii) network-based slot scheduling
The strategic scheduling of airport slots signifies a challenging stream of research that has drawn the increasing attention of the research community during the last decade or so
Summary
Air transport plays a significant role for the European economy since it transports 8.8 % of passengers (575 billion pkm) and 0.1 % of freight (3 billion tkm), representing 22.8 % of EU27 trade by value with the rest of the world (748 billion Euros) in 2011 (European Commission 2013). The policy and research community has recently placed the focus on two alternative (and potentially complementary to each other) directions (de Neufville and Odoni 2003): (i) approaches introducing market-driven or pure economic instruments (e.g., slot trading, auctions, congestion pricing) aiming to allocate capacity among competing users by considering real market (or approximations of) valuations of access to congested airport facilities and (ii) efforts aiming to improve the efficiency of the IATAbased allocation mechanism from a slot scheduling point of view. The air transport scheduling problem at hand pertains to the allocation of scarce airport resources (declared airport capacity expressed in slots) for use by airlines into a specific date and time interval. The paper is complemented by a glossary of key terms (Table 1) and a list of acronyms (Table 2)
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