Transportation Science: Air Traffic Capacity Planning

In European air traffic management, it is an important decision how much capacity to provide for each airspace, and it has to be made weeks or even months in advance of the day of operation. Given the uncertainty in demand that may materialize until then along with variability in capacity provision (e.g., due to weather), airspace users could face high costs of displacements (i.e., delays and re-routings) if capacity is not provided where and when needed.

We propose a new capacity sharing scheme in which some proportion of overall capacities can be flexibly deployed in any of the airspaces of the same alliance (at an increased unit cost). This allows us to hedge against the risk of capacity underprovision.

The paper has recently been accepted in the transportation research community's flagship journal Transportation Science.

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