Optimal network-wide adjustments of initial airport slot allocations with connectivity and fairness objectives

Abstract

Due to serious demand-supply imbalances, many airports around the world are highly congested. Access to these highly congested (Level 3, coordinated) airports is controlled through the use of the IATA World Airport Slot allocation Guidelines (WASG). At an individual airport, slots requested by each airline are allocated at the airport under consideration independently without taking into account the interactions between slots allocated at different airports. However, in order for the air-transport network to operate seamlessly, ensuring network-wide connectivity of flights, and the interdependencies existing between the slots allocated at individual airports need to be considered. Several models have been proposed in the literature to deal with the optimum allocation of slots at a single airport. However, the literature currently does not adequately address the network-wide slot allocation problem. In this paper, we are introducing a novel approach to address the network-wide slot allocation problem. Our approach considers as an input the individual airport schedules generated during the slot allocation process at individual airports and optimally adjusts them to ensure network-wide flight connectivity by taking into account the interdependencies existing between flights connecting pairs of airports.To this end, we propose bi-objective mathematical models, which consider schedule efficiency and inter-airline fairness objectives, and incorporate the importance that different airports have for the functioning of the air transport network, using the IATA connectivity indices and the betweenness centrality measures. We solve the proposed models using the ε − constraint method to investigate trade-offs between network-wide schedule efficiency and fairness, and we investigate the effect of these trade-offs on the airlines and the airports. Results from the application of the proposed models to a test network suggest that the consideration of the contribution of the airports to network connectivity affect the way that the total network-wide schedule displacement is distributed among the airports. Specifically, we found that the use of the IATA connectivity index tends to allocate less schedule displacement to airports with frequent flights to many destinations, while the use of the betweenness centrality measure allocates less schedule displacement to airports that are more critical in ensuring the connectivity of other airports in the network.