Title: A two-level hierarchical framework for air traffic flow management

Authors: Charis Ntakolia; Argyro Kalimeri; John Coletsos

Addresses: Department of Aeronautical Studies, Sector of Materials Engineering, Machining Technology and Production Management, Hellenic Air Force Academy, Greece ' Department of Aeronautical Studies, Sector of Materials Engineering, Machining Technology and Production Management, Hellenic Air Force Academy, Greece ' Department of Mathematics, School of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Abstract: The new initiatives of air traffic management (ATM) imposed by EUROCONTROL and EU Commission aim to eliminate the drawbacks of the current ATM system in Europe. Triggered by the imperative need for increasing the air sectors' capacity to face the future increase in the flight demand, innovative methodologies are developed aligned with the modernisation of ATM procedures. This study proposes a two-level hierarchical framework based on mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) in the context of free flight. The first level aims to minimise the costs derived from ground - holding and cancellation policies, and from fuel consumption due to airborne delays and speed deviations. The second level focuses on minimising the costs derived from the fuel consumption for travelling in specified direction, speed and flight levels. The framework generates the optimal 4D trajectories of each airplane for a given time frame. It is designed as a two-level hierarchical architecture model to decrease the computing demands of NP hard formulations of current ATM mathematical models.

Keywords: air traffic flow management; mixed integer nonlinear programming; MINLP; hierarchical architecture; computer-assisted ATFM; free flight.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDSS.2021.119125

International Journal of Decision Support Systems, 2021 Vol.4 No.4, pp.271 - 292

Received: 10 Aug 2020
Accepted: 30 Jan 2021
Published online: 23 Nov 2021 *

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