Optimization-based model for short-term air traffic flow management

The objective of short term air traffic flow management is to generate an optimal scheme for air traffic flow control when the local airspace capacity decreases for unexpected reasons. This paper presents a new optimization based model ST TFMP2, which is based on the fundamental model ST TFMP. The new model is considered more precise because its output not only presents the optimal control scheme for aggregated traffic flow in the next several hours, but also allocates each flight's optimal arrival time, departure time, airborne holding time, and ground holding time as well. A sequential optimization heuristic algorithm (SOH) is also presented to resolve practical scale ST TFMP2 models in a limited time.