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An Airspace-Planning and Collaborative Decision-Making Model: Part II—Cost Model, Data Considerations, and Computations

Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (0118), Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061
Department of Operational Sciences, Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio 45433
Charles Edward Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (0105), Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061
hanifs{at}vt.edu
raymond.staats{at}afit.edu
vuela{at}vt.edu

In Part I of this paper, we presented a large-scale airspace-planning and collaborative decision-making (APCDM) model that is part of a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)-sponsored effort to enhance the management of the National Airspace System (NAS). Given a set of flights that must be scheduled during some planning horizon, along with alternative surrogate trajectories for each flight, we developed a mixed-integer programming model to select a set of flight plans from among these alternatives, subject to flight safety, air-traffic control workload, and airline equity considerations. The present paper offers insights related to, and a detailed description of, implementing this APCDM model, including the development of a comprehensive cost model, a study for prescribing a set of appropriate parameter values for the overall model, and an investigation on incorporating a suitable set of valid inequalities in the model formulation. Computational results are presented based on several test cases derived from the Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS) data provided by the FAA. The results indicate that under plausible probabilistic trajectory error assumptions and with the incorporation of star subgraph convex hull-based valid inequalities, the model offers a viable tool that can be used by the FAA for both tactical and strategic applications.

Key Words: air traffic management; national airspace; aircraft conflict resolution; sector workload measures; airline equity; mixed-integer programming; valid inequalities
History: Received: January 2004; revised: February 2005; accepted: October 2005.