Leveraging demand-capacity balancing to reduce air traffic emissions and improve overall network performance

Jan-Rasmus Künnen, Arne K. Strauss, Nikola Ivanov, Radosav Jovanović and Frank Fichert

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2023, vol. 174, issue C

Abstract: Improvements in European air traffic management (ATM) constitute one of the key levers to reduce aviation emissions in the future to reach ambitious goals. In this paper, we evaluate the benefits of improved network-centric ATM with coordinated optimisation of capacity, delays, re-routings and emissions vs the present fragmented ATM which has generated high delays and extensive re-routing due to sub-optimal capacity provision. In addition, we analyse the impact on flight efficiency of a novel trajectory-independent airport-pair charging scheme, which makes shortest routes the cheapest for Airspace Users (AUs), which is not always the case with the current charging scheme in Europe. We test and evaluate proposed changes in ATM using a case study based on real data covering 3,000–4,000 flights in large parts of Western European airspace. We find that network-centric ATM can reduce variable costs borne by AUs by 21% and in particular re-routing cost (and associated emissions) by almost 64%. Furthermore, airport-pair charging can save almost 11% of costs for AUs and up to 320,000 tons of CO2 emissions — if accompanied by adequate capacity changes that reflect the shift in demand towards shorter trajectories. We conclude that various stakeholder initiatives to reduce the fragmentation in European ATM and to move towards a more network-centric approach have merits and should be pursued by the policy makers.

Keywords: Air traffic management; Capacity planning; Demand-capacity balancing; Aviation emissions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856423001362
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transa:v:174:y:2023:i:c:s0965856423001362

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2023.103716

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice is currently edited by John (J.M.) Rose

More articles in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().