Capacity-Driven Automatic Design of Dynamic Aircraft Arrival Routes

We present a Mixed-Integer Programming framework for the design of aircraft arrival routes in a Terminal Maneuvering Area (TMA) that guarantee temporal separation of aircraft. The output routes constitute operationally feasible merge trees, and guarantee that the overall traffic pattern in the TMA can be monitored by air traffic controllers; in particular, we ensure that all aircraft on the arrival routes are separated in time and all merge points are spatially separated. We present a proof of concept of our approach, and demonstrate its feasibility by experiments for arrival routes during one hour at Stockholm TMA.