User-Driven Prioritisation Process (UDPP) from advanced experimental to pre-operational validation environment

Abstract

When the European Air Traffic Management Network (EATMN) approaches its capacity limits at certain airports, generating increasingly costly delays to flights and for passengers, reducing the impacts on airlines and passengers will be essential. There are two ways to address such increases in delay and costs. One is to strive to augment the capacity to reduce both delays and costs. The other one, adopted in this paper, is to reduce the impact of the delay on airlines and passengers.The User Driven Prioritisation Process (UDPP) provides airlines with additional flexibility in planning within constrained situations where delays are allocated, beyond the current slot swapping process already implemented by the EUROCONTROL Network Manager (NM).The paper presents recent validation results. It summarizes earlier results in a simplified EATMN with one constraint and several AUs showing that UDPP could reduce the impact of that delays on AUs' direct operational costs by 58% on average, and improves passengers’ connections. The paper then describes a parallel validation activity including several trials with SWISS. It focuses on the most recent validation results in a pre-operational environment close to SWISS Operations Control Centre (OCC). The results revealed overall operational benefit up to 65% improvement for the airline; and an initial impact assessment on the EATMN -although limited to one UDPP in the EATMN and one airline using it- shows promising results for the on-going integration closer to operations.While limited due to the simplified network context, these results are encouraging to undertake more complete network impact studies as well as to move forward to environments that are more realistic, bridging towards deployment.