Sequence Assignment Model for the Flight Conflict Resolution Problem

Zhe Liang (), Wanpracha Art Chaovalitwongse () and Elsayed A. Elsayed ()
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Zhe Liang: School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 20092, China
Wanpracha Art Chaovalitwongse: Departments of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Radiology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195
Elsayed A. Elsayed: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854

Transportation Science, 2014, vol. 48, issue 3, 334-350

Abstract: Each and every day, certain air route traffic control centers receive a large number of requested flight plans, each detailing the level, track, and entry time for the flight to enter the oceanic airspace. Because each airline independently optimizes its own flight plans, it is common that the requested flight plans result in an unbalanced usage of level and track capacities and a conflicting schedule that violates the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) safety standards. In such a situation, the flight conflict resolution problem is to provide a schedule that minimizes the total penalty cost of delay, level change, and track change while maintaining the FAA separation standards. In this paper, we propose a flight sequence assignment model (FSAM) that selects an optimal set of flight sequences to minimize the total penalty cost. We develop a column generation framework with a bilinear pricing subproblem to solve the linear relaxation of the FSAM, and use a branch-and-price method to find the integer optimal solution. The proposed model is tested on 10 simulated instances randomly constructed based on a real data set. The results show that the FSAM outperforms all other methods in all test instances. We also extend the FSAM to incorporate equity of flight plans among airlines. The computational results show that the equity constraints marginally increase the overall schedule disruption.

Keywords: integer programming; column generation; branch-and-price method; flight conflict resolution; air traffic management; flight scheduling; equity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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