The impacts of longitudinal separation, efficiency loss, and cruise speed adjustment in robust terminal traffic flow problem under uncertainty

Minimization of approaching time and maximization of the utilization of air route and airport resources are the two ultimate goals of air traffic control. This research considers arrival sequence and the uncertain arrival times at entry waypoints of flights and investigates the impact of air traffic controller specific parameters in the model. The two-stage optimization framework will first determine a deterministic schedule and optimize the approaching time while considering additional longitudinal separation, efficiency loss from deterministic schedule, and cruise speed adjustment in the second-stage optimization model via sample average approximation. The numerical experiments suggested an efficiency loss of 20%, which can absorb the empirical probabilistic lateness at entry waypoints with the real-world data. The proposed method could determine the estimated average delay time at runways with different settings of additional buffer for longitudinal separation and trade-off parameters between the estimated average delay time and estimated penalty cost of cruise speed adjustment.

Automated summary

The minimization of approaching time and the maximization of the utilization of air route and airport resources are the two main goals of air traffic control. This research investigates the impact of air traffic controller specific parameters on the arrival sequence and uncertain arrival times at entry waypoints of flights. The proposed two-stage optimization framework determines a deterministic schedule and optimizes the approaching time while considering additional factors such as longitudinal separation and cruise speed adjustment.