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This paper presents an integer programming model for strategic redistribution of flights so as to respect nominal sector capacities, in short computation times for large-scale instances. The main contribution lies in the combination of tackling large-scale strategic flight planning using hard capacity constraints, while considering the whole network (i.e., both airports and sectors). Real historic data for network and traffic description are used for our test instance. Strategic and tactical impact assessments show that early flight planning can lead to the reduction of delays and their costs, showing potential for actual implementation.

Impacts of explosive volcanic eruptions on civil aviation were reconsidered after the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland, which caused unprecedented disruptions of air traffic operations in Europe. During and after the aviation breakdown of April–May 2010, communication between the involved stakeholders was recognized as a major concern. Due to the complexity and multidisciplinary nature of the topic, a great number of actors are involved, which often have little interaction outside these exceptional events. In this work, we aim at identifying the relationships between the stakeholders involved in aviation management during eruptions, as well as their needs and priorities. We perform an anonymous on-line survey, focused mainly on the use of tephra dispersal models for civil aviation purposes. We collect feedback on recent developments including our current impact assessment research, which produced a GIS-based software tool to estimate impacts on aviation based on tephra dispersal forecasts. Answers allow identifying stakeholders' requirements on ash dispersal forecasts and their use for aviation management purposes. We underline the main differences between three homogeneous groups (aviation managers and employees, modellers and field scientists, other stakeholders) and identify main end-user requirements for developing tools similar to ours. This work provides useful insights for the development of tools to support aviation stakeholders during volcanic eruptions.

We present a methodology to estimate the impacts of volcanic ash dispersal on civil avia- tion and a software tool aimed at assisting air traffic management in the event of ash-con- taminated airspace. The tool merges atmospheric dispersal model forecasts with air traffic data in a map-based platform to produce tables and maps showing potentially affected air- ports, flights and airspace sectors. Impacts can be estimated based on user-defined ash con- centration thresholds, or on the amount of ash potentially ingested by airplanes flying through diluted ash clouds. The impact can be assessed on single Flight Level (FL) slabs, or across the whole vertical airspace. The procedure is automated within a Geographical Information System (GIS). For illustrative purposes, we estimate the potential impacts on the European air traffic of an eruption from Katla volcano in Iceland, assuming a ‘‘worst- case’’ meteorological scenario. We compare the capabilities of the tool with those of similar existing software and justify our design choices. Finally, we discuss the use of the tool in current and future air traffic management strategies during explosive volcanic eruptions.

In Europe, all Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) finance their activities by charging airlines to use their airspace. These ‘en route charges’ usually account for a significant fraction of the cost of a flight, and they can therefore influence the route choice: airlines may decide to fly longer routes to avoid countries with higher charges. Then ANSPs’ traffic and revenue do depend on the charge they impose on their own airspace. It follows that if ANSPs look for the maximization of their revenues, they must choose an optimal charge to impose on their airspace. We show that this optimal charge can be identified through a Network Pricing Problem formulation in the form of Bilevel Programming where the leader (i.e. the ANSP) owns a set of arcs (the airways in its national airspace) and charges the commodities (i.e. the flights) passing through them. As the en route charges are proportional to a Unit Rate value fixed by the ANSP, by exploiting the structure of the problem we propose an exact algorithm to compute the optimal Unit Rate and apply it to a case study.

Air Traffic Flow Management delays are often caused by multiple capacity constrained air traffic resources. In this context, the authors propose an individual rational and weakly budget balanced market-based negotiation mechanism between flights and the network manager. This mechanism allows flights to pay for reducing their delays or get compensations if they accept an increased delay, with respect to the delay allocated under a First-Planned-First-Served policy. Specifically, the authors introduce a Lagrangian-based primal distributed heuristic that enables flights to determine the market price of the airspace resources composing their business trajectories. Some computational experience based on a real case instance is reported.

Airlines need to pay special attention to flights that may be liable to produce undesired downstream effects if subjected to delay. A mathematical formulation is proposed to identify these critical flights by defining a set of temporal intervals, called time window, which must be met during the flight execution. The width of the time window is variable because it reflects all known constraints on runway capacities or on congested en route sectors that the flight will go through, or both. The set of optimal time window that maximizes their overall width was chosen, thus providing airline operators with the largest degree of flexibility to perform their flights. Three possible approaches are presented to compute the utilization of the system capacity. By means of a computational analysis, it is shown that the solution of the time window model is insensitive about the formulation used for the capacity constraints.

In Europe, when an imbalance between demand and capacity is detected for air traffic network resources, Air Traffic Flow Management slots are allocated to flights on the basis of a First Planned First Served principle. In the case of a single constrained en-route sector or airport, we propose a mechanism for slot allocation which is based on market principles as it enables airlines to pay for delay reduction or receive compensation for delay increase. The mechanism fulfills the properties of individual rationality, budget balance, coalitional rationality and Pareto efficiency, and it can be implemented through two alternative distributed approaches that do not require airlines to disclose confidential information. Both approaches have the additional advantage that they directly involve airlines in the decision making process. Two computational examples relying on real data indicate that the market-based solution allows the participating airlines to significantly decrease their overall delay-related costs with respect to the First Planned First Served allocation.

The main operational concept of Single European Sky ATM Research Programme is the notion of business trajectory. One possible implementation is based on the notion of a contract of objectives; an agreement among the main air traffic management actors on spatial and temporal intervals called target windows. These 4D windows are defined prior to flight departure by the airlines, airports and air navigation service providers to increase punctuality. We use an analytic hierarchy process to assess the opportunity of implementing this concept by considering the views of experts. The findings indicate that there are net benefits for airlines and air navigation service providers but not for airports

The Contract of Objectives (CoO), which is based on Target Windows (TWs), constitutes a new concept of operations for Air Traffic Management. TWs are represented by 4-D windows to be respected during the flight execution. They are negotiated and formally agreed by all the different actors involved in the execution of a flight and are located at the transfer of responsibility areas between them. This paper focuses on the TW modelling process which is at the base of the operational assessment carried on in the framework of the CATS project to investigate the impact of this concept on Air Traffic Controllers and pilots’ working methods. In particular in this paper we focus on the TW model which has been developed for the first Human In the Loop (HIL) experiment, a real time simulation carried on to assess the impact of the concept on air traffic controllers working methods. A different work by CATS project elaborates instead on the specific indicators measured during this experiment, regarding both system performances and human performances observed during the HIL.

The introduction of the Central European Air Traffic Services Upper Area Control Centre controlling the upper airspace of several European countries allows different route-charging policies. The impact of three charging scenarios on aircraft operators is examined. It is found that, without a compensatory mechanism, the policy of having different unit rates for each air navigation service provider would adversely affect regional and region-based carriers because the unit rate of the new provider would be significantly lower than the unit rates of the national providers controlling the lower airspaces.