Abstract

Nowadays, the aircraft is the most used transport to travel between two very distanced places since it is the fastest way. For these last years, the demand of flights has been increasing immensely, so the airports have been also suffering the same increase in workload. Congestion is the word for the imbalance between demand and capacity. After applying a Ground Holding Program (GHP) optimization process before departure to solve this problem in a previous work [1], in this project the Air Holding Program (AHP) is presented in order to minimize the economic costs once in the landing phase. The main goal of this final degree project is to implement a basic model of AHP to minimize the delay costs near the single destination airport, Barcelona-El Prat in this case. The model of AHP is based on a dynamic stochastic GHP. The problem is solved using Gurobi libraries. Firstly, a pre-tactical phase in [1] of GHP is applied to make flights wait on ground according to capacity constraints in the Barcelona Airport. Then, once the flights are already flying towards the destination and entering the analysed area (500 km from destination airport), these flights will perform a Free Route Airspace (FRA) route in order to make them fly a straight route trajectory to possibly shorten the flight duration, which will cause that the arrival queue be again disordered making the capacity constraint again violated. In order to minimize the air delay costs, a second optimization to assign air delay is applied called AHP. Once the flights are leaving this airspace, they will be communicated their final assigned holding. Finally when they are entering the landing phase, they should first pass through the holding procedure to hold the time needed according to the delay assigned. Some of the conclusions after this research is that if capacity is reduced in destination airport, firstly a GHP can be applied before departure [1]. Then, an AHP can be applied for a second optimization purpose. If traffic is directly taken to be applied an AHP, the capacity flexibility is very reduced, while using pre-tactical regulation the capacity could be as small as desired. This outlines the advantage of using GHP and AHP together. Furthermore, although the main objective is to minimize the delay costs, if the flights are arriving earlier than scheduled in the most optimal case, the delays could be negative values, which means that costs are saved.