SOME MODELS AND ALGORITHMS FOR EN ROUTE AIR TRAFFIC FLOW MANAGEMENT.

This paper considers the air traffic Flow Management Problem (FMP) for the airspace case (where bottlenecks are not only airports but could also be, for example, sectors). Only temporal solutions are allowed, which means that no altemative routes can be used, thus aircraft 'holds' are the management instruments to be used. The formulation of a general model is first proposed and then a more precise and realistic Binary Integer Programming-based model is developed. Solutions are obtained using Linear Programming supplemented by a heuristic, or a heuristic only. Some of the results of numerous experiments using real-life data are presented for illustrative purposes.