Implementation of a Long-Range Air Traffic Flow Management for the Asia-Pacific Region

Abstract

We provide a concept of operations and a corresponding implementation of a long-range air traffic flow management in the Asia-Pacific region. This management will provide an appropriate demandcapacity balancing considering both aircraft sequencing by local arrival management procedures and flow optimization to prevent over-demand in the approach area around the airport. Thus, coordination of longrange international flights demands collaboration between different flight information regions and local regulations. As Singapore Changi Airport is a central element of the Asia-Pacific flow management high share of long-haul air traffic, we use this airport to demonstrate our approach. To derive the operational conditions and actual traffic patterns at the airport, ADS-B messages and flight plan information are processed. The data are cleaned, analyzed, and filtered to provide information about arrival flows within given distances to the airport. We provide an efficacy analysis of the long-range air traffic flow management using two approaches. First, we applied a mixed-integer optimization of time shifts of normal distributed flight times. Here, the regulation of long-range flights by time shifts (e.g., achieved by speed advisories) shows a significant relief from periods of over-demand at the airport approach sector. Second, we implement a reference and a test case scenario in an agent-based simulation environment including the local arrival management procedures. Here, the number of holdings and the associated holding time could be reduced by at least 26%.

Untangling Complexity in ASEAN Air Traffic Management through Time-Varying Queuing Models

“…For balancing the local hotspot deconfliction in the wider regional network, the other potential solution could be strategic arrival traffic flow management. The authors' past research indicated that aircraft arrival time control led to a less severe phase of excessive traffic demands when applying the concept of long range air traffic flow management (LR-ATFM) [25]. The LR-ATFM concept aimed to control the entry time of long-haul flights into the approach sector, assuming the opportunities for aircraft to control speed and/or to change tracks.…”