A resolution method in case of air congestion: rerouting and/or ground holding approach

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of congestion in air transportation systems. Congestion occurs when demand for the infrastructures exceeds their capacity, causing delays as one of the main drawbacks. Congestion can be solved by applying ground holding and/or rerouting flights operations. Such procedures often imply delays and a series of significant reactionary costs for all the operators of the air traffic management. In this paper authors propose a method to solve the congestion by an optimizaion algorithm combining the ground holding and/or rerouting operations. Aircraft rerouting is performed by a tailored shortest path algorithm. A real portion of the air traffic network and a real slice of the air traffic flow have been considered for the experiments.