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

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Robust schedule design
• air traffic control
• sample average approximation
• optimization
• aviation

Acknowledgments

The research is supported by the Research Grants Council, the Hong Kong Government (Grant number PolyU25218321), The Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant number 72101144, 71971143), the Research Committee of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Project number BE3V, G-YBFD and G-YBN1), and Shanghai Pujiang Programme (2021PJC067).

Declarations of interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Inappropriate TMA maneuvering, human error and operations include collision with obstacles during take-off and landing (CTOL), runway incursions (RI), loss of separation/midair collisions (MAC) and abnormal runway contact. See ICAO – aviation occurrence categories for further information. https://www.icao.int/APAC/Meetings/2012_APRAST/OccurrenceCategoryDefinitions.pdf

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University [G-YBFD, G-YBN1]; Hong Kong Polytechnic University [BE3V]; Shanghai Pujiang Programme [2021PJC067]; Natural Science Foundation of China [71971143]; Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee [PolyU25218321].