Modeling Flight Delay Propagation in Airport and Airspace Network

Abstract

An Airport-Sector Network Delays model is developed in this paper for flight delay estimation within air transport network. This model takes both airports and airspace capacities into account by iterating among its three main components: a queuing engine, which treats each airport in the network as a queuing system and is used to compute delays at individual airport, a Link Transmission Model, which computes delays at individual sector and transmits all air delays into ground delays, and a delay propagation algorithm that updates flight itineraries and demand rates at each airport on the basis of the local delays computed by the queuing engine and flow control delays computed by the Link Transmission Model. The model has been implemented to a network consisting of the 21 busiest airports in China and 2962 links that represent to 151 enroute control sectors in mainland China, and its performance is evaluated by comparing with the actual delay data and results of Airport Network Delays model. It is found that the proposed model is well-suited for simulating delays in air transport system where either airports or airspace could be the bottleneck of the system.