Optimizing and Prioritizing Air Traffic Flow Management in a European Scenario

at a specific node of the Air Traffic Management (ATM) network, but it does not allow controlling the distribution of delay assignment and it does not take into account traffic conditions elsewhere in the network. Optimization and prioritization add value compared to FCFS. The ATFM toolset applies optimization aiming for efficient regulations and, at the same time, controlling the distribution and assignment of pre-departure imposed delays. This is accomplished by optimizing towards a weighted minimum of average delay and spread of delay per network node. Delay assignment per flight is accomplished by selecting the most penalized node of a flight along its flightpath. Prioritization is added as a relative weight factor during optimization. Prioritization may serve several objectives each with the purpose to add weight to a flight representing its specific condition regarding either network throughput or economic value. An example of prioritizing network throughput is to prioritize all flights to and from a disrupted airport with the aim to avoid penalizing an airport already struggling with capacity problems, and an example of priority by economic value is allowing Airline Operators to prioritise specific flights at a specific cost. They will receive priority but balanced against the performance of the ATM network. The tool to process imposed delays is ready as a prototype and is used for a number of validation exercises all running basically on one scenario. The applicable scenario is a European enlarged Core Area scenario of around 25.000 flights in 24 hours. The tool turns out to be robust under varying operational conditions and varying levels of disruption. To evaluate operational benefits, the ATFM results have to be processed on simulated operations, simulating the scenario in fast-time, and evaluating the impact of regulations on queuing and workload. This article describes the present status of research, mainly focused on the prototype of the ATFM tool, and future work, focused on fast-time simulation and validation. Also some early results of validated operational benefits are presented.