Determining the Number of Airport Arrival Slots

Abstract

At many congested airports, access rights are governed by a system of slot controls. A slot conveys to its owner the right to schedule an operation (flight arrival or departure). In this paper, stochastic optimization models are developed to determine the numbers of slots to make available over the course of a day, controlling for the long-term uncertainty induced in arrival or departure capacities because of weather conditions. Three related integer programming formulations for this problem are presented, which vary both in their computational properties and the economic trade-offs modeled. The models are compared both analytically and computationally. Experiments using data from New York's LaGaurdia Airport are reported to demonstrate the impact of these models on optimizing slot profiles while considering long-term capacity uncertainty and several policy objectives.

On the Impact of Scheduling Limits: A Case Study at Newark Liberty International Airport

“…Finally, as described at the end of §2, the DS, AND, and Churchill et al (2013) models could be used together in a powerful combination that would (a) determine an optimal, possibly time-varying set of scheduling limits over a day at a congested airport (Churchill et al model); (b) "smoothen" a preexisting demand profile to generate a detailed schedule of flights that complies with these scheduling limits, while minimizing flight displacement and preserving aircraft and passenger connections (DS model); and (c) estimate the effects of this schedule on local and networkwide delays (AND model). a single slot-constrained airport K = 1 , F may contain as many as 2,000 flights (depending on the size of the airport), resulting in 2,000 variables and 4 million constraints for the integer program.…”

“…Finally, in §4 we use the Airport Network Delays (AND) model (Pyrgiotis, Malone, and Odoni 2013), a macroscopic and fast stochastic and dynamic model of congestion and delays at a network of major airports, to test the effect of several flight schedules produced under various scheduling limits at EWR, on local and networkwide delays for several different capacity conditions. It is noteworthy that our work and the model of Churchill et al (2013) are highly complementary. First, the latter can be used to estimate the optimal number of slots at a subject airport-such as a "schedule" consisting of a (possibly varying) limit on the number of slots in each hour of the day.…”

“…The second relevant paper is that of Churchill et al (2013); that study uses a stochastic programming approach to compute the optimal number of arrival slots that should be allocated to airlines at a congested airport. Their approach is particularly notable in two respects: it accounts for different valuations of slots at different times of the day and may thus recommend slot caps that vary with time of day; it also considers historical weather patterns at the airport to account for the possibility that flights may be canceled at different times during the course of a day.…”

Trading airport time slots: Market design with complex constraints

“…The past few decades have have led to significant research on airport congestion management ( Churchill et al, 2012;Vaze and Barnhart, 2012;Pyrgiotis and Odoni, 2015;Gillen et al, 2016 ). In what follows, we provide a brief discussion of alternative streams in the literature.…”

Increasing airport capacity utilisation through optimum slot scheduling: review of current developments and identification of future needs

“…Churchill et al (2012) developed a stochastic optimisation model to determine the optimal, timevarying number of slots that should be made available for allocation at a certain (single) airport, taking into account: (i) the long-term capacity uncertainty (i.e., various capacity profile scenarios) due to weather conditions and (ii) different valuations of slots (in economic terms) at different times of the day. Three interesting observations can be made here.…”