Dynamic stochastic scheduler for integrated arrivals and departures

Abstract

In terminal airspace, inefficient operations occur frequently due to constrained airspace and uncertainty. Choke points can easily form in the terminal area and therefore reduce the efficiency of the entire National Airspace System. Based on previous work on scheduling of aircraft arrivals and departures with shared fixes in terminal airspace and uncertainty in departure and arrival times, this work extends the previous stochastic scheduler with dynamic capability such that the scheduler can be sequentially applied to air traffic in terminal airspace with a much larger time frame through sliding windows instead of a static 30-minute traffic scenario. Results show that great delay savings can be achieved by using the dynamic stochastic scheduler relative to current air traffic control procedures. With a 30-minute time window, if an aggressive solution is chosen, on average 5.2 hours can be saved in a day in Los Angeles out of the 30% arrivals and 10% departures that are covered in the experiment. The expected value of annual fuel saving would be more than 10 million dollars. However, the cost of potential controller intervention, which results from the uncertainty of estimated departure and arrival times, will increase by 50% on average. If a moderate solution is chosen instead, with the same expected controller intervention as using current procedure, more than four hours delay saving can still be expected. When uncertainty of departure time increases with look-ahead time, experiments show that optimizations with large windows still find better solutions than the ones with small windows when delay saving is moderate. However, when delay saving is high, time-varied uncertainty plays a more important role than window size, where a small window is preferred for finding good solutions.