European Air Traffic Flow Management with Strategic Deconfliction

Abstract

To guarantee a safe journey for each aircraft, air traffic controllers make sure that separation minima are maintained. To prevent controller overburdening, each controller team is responsible for one confined sector. Furthermore, sectors limit the number of flights entering each hour. Compliance to all sector and airport capacity constraints in daily business is ensured by EUROCONTROL’s Network Management. This function balances the flights’ demand of airspace with available capacity by re-allocating departure timeslots. However, when minimum separation between two aircraft may become compromised, a conflict occurs. Conflicts are solved by controllers who provide pilots with instructions to maintain separation. Hence, conflicts increase controller workload and thus tighten sector capacity. The aim of this work is a prevention of actual conflicts by strategic deconfliction. Strategic conflicts refer to planned trajectories which violate separation minima in any future point in space and time. Mimicking a future Network Management, departure times are re-allocated to reduce the number of strategic conflicts while satisfying both sector and airport capacity constraints. As a basis for the deconfliction, actual datasets of planned trajectories, sector bounds and airport features are aggregated to model the European Air Traffic Flow Management. The allocation problem of departure timeslots is formulated as a Quadratic Binary Problem with linear delay costs, quadratic conflict costs and linear constraints. In an optimal solution, all strategic conflicts are solved. Finally, a trade-off between conflict reduction and delay is performed.