Hybrid method for holistic air traffic demand and capacity balancing optimisation based on sector complexity

Abstract

This paper presents a new hybrid method, based on simulated annealing and dynamic programming, tailored to solve a Demand and Capacity Balancing (DCB) problem that overcomes the limitations of the current Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management (ATFCM) system by: (a) the introduction of complexity metrics (instead of entry counts) in order to measure the traffic load; (b) the better consideration of the airspace users’ preferences, allowing the possibility of submitting alternative trajectories to avoid congested airspace; and (c) the holistic integration of the demand and capacity management into the same optimisation problem. This new method is compared with the state-of-the-art method for MILP providing better performance principally when the difficulty of the problem increases. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a real-scale scenario, demonstrating its practical applicability in real-world cases.