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Three decades of research studies in ground delay program (GDP) decision-making, and air traffic flow management in general, have produced several analytical models and decision support tools to design GDPs with minimum delay costs. Most of these models are centralized, i.e., the central authority almost completely decides the GDP design by optimizing certain centralized objectives. In this paper, we assess the benefits of an airline-driven decentralized approach for designing GDPs. The motivation for an airline-driven approach is the ability to incorporate the inherent differences between airlines when prioritizing, and responding to, different GDP designs. Such differences arise from the airlines’ diverse business objectives and operational characteristics. We develop an integrated platform for simulating flight operations during GDPs, an airline recovery module for mimicking the recovery actions of each individual airline under a GDP, and an algorithm for fast solution of the recovery problems to optimality. While some of the individual analytical components of our framework, model and algorithm share certain similarities with those used by previous researchers, to the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first comprehensive platform for simulating and optimizing airline operations under a GDP and is the most important technological contribution of this paper. Using this framework, we conduct detailed computational experiments based on actual schedule data at three of the busiest airports in the United States. We choose the recently developed Majority Judgment voting and grading method as our airline-driven decentralized approach for GDP design because of the superior theoretical and practical benefits afforded by this approach as shown by multiple recent studies. The results of our evaluation suggest that adopting this airline-driven approach in designing the GDPs consistently and significantly reduces airport-wide delay costs compared to the state-of-the-research centralized approaches. Moreover, the cost reduction benefits of the resultant airline-driven GDP designs are equitably distributed across different airlines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high cost of flight delays for airlines has motivated scientific research in air traffic flow management (ATFM). The majority of ATFM models in the literature are deterministic and do not take into account stochastic factors such as weather. In this paper, new stochastic programming models for ATFM are proposed. The models include as tactical control options: ground holding, airborne holding and rerouting. To solve the models, a new heuristic method that takes advantage of the problem structure is derived and illustrated. Computational results show that the heuristic method provides practical computation times. Furthermore, the value of the stochastic solution is up to 14% for cases where adverse weather affects a significant part of the network. This implies that using the proposed approach to make air traffic flow decisions can lead to tangible monetary benefits for airlines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air traffic flow management (ATFM) attempts to maintain a safe and efficient flow of aircraft given demand-capacity mismatches while ensuring an equitable distribution of delays among stakeholders. There has been extensive research addressing network effects (such as the presence of multiple airports, sectors, and connectivity requirements) in ATFM, but it has not explicitly incorporated the equitable distribution of delays, as well as work on the equitable distribution of delays in a single-airport setting, such as ration-by-schedule (RBS) as introduced under the collaborative decision-making paradigm. In this paper, we develop a two stage approach for network ATFM that incorporates fairness and airline collaboration. In Stage 1, we propose a discrete optimization model that attempts to incorporate an equitable distribution of delays among airlines by introducing a notion of fairness in network ATFM models--controlling the number of reversals and total amount of overtaking, which is a natural generalization of RBS. For two flights f and f', a reversal occurs when flight f' arrives before f', when f' was scheduled to arrive before f'. In the event a reversal occurs, the number of time periods between the arrival times constitutes overtaking. In Stage 2, we allow for airline collaboration by proposing a network model for slot reallocation. We provide extensive empirical results of the proposed optimization models on national-scale, real-world data sets spanning six days that show interesting trade-offs between fairness and efficiency. We report computational times of less than 30 minutes for up to 25 airports and provide theoretical evidence that illuminates the strength of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the major airlines in the United States have embraced a new initiative to improve air traffic flow management. This initiative, called collaborative decision making (CDM), is based on the recognition that improved data exchange and communication between the FAA and the airlines will lead to better decision making. In particular, the CDM philosophy emphasizes that decisions with a potential economic impact on airlines should be decentralized and made in collaboration with the airlines whenever possible. The CDM paradigm has led to fundamental changes in the implementation of ground delay programs. A key component has been the introduction of the compression procedure, which allows for the exchange of arrival slots between airlines. In this paper, we consider opportunities for increased airline control by interpreting the compression procedure as a mediated slot trading mechanism. Based on this interpretation, we propose an extension that allows airlines to submit so-called at-least, at-most offers. We develop an efficient integer programming model to solve the mediator's problem, and show that the resulting mechanism can substantially improve the ability of airlines to optimize their internal cost functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]