Towards Conformance Criteria for Ensuring Fairness Among Airspace Users in Collaborative Optimization of Flight Lists in Air Traffic Flow Management

In air traffic flow management (ATFM), unexpected events such as bad weather conditions regularly reduce airport capacity. In such cases of temporarily reduced capacity, the EUROCONTROL Network Manager issues a regulation, which results in arriving flights being assigned a new target time of arrival (TTA), usually on a first-planned, first-served (FPFS) basis. These TTA assignments, however, may be inefficient due to the varying delay costs of individual flights. Therefore, one of the solutions of the SESAR project HARMONIC aims to develop a platform for collaborative optimization of arrival flight lists - a Target Time Management System (TTMS). The TTMS allows airspace users (AUs) and the airport to provide their preferences as input for an optimization of the arrival flight list. In this regard, one challenge is to define conformance criteria applying to the preferences submitted by the AUs in order to reduce the possibility that the preferences of individual AUs intentionally manipulate the optimization process, thus ensuring fairness among AUs. These conformance criteria should be easy to understand and have little or no negative impact on the optimization results. In this paper, we investigate the impact of different configurations of easy-to-understand conformance criteria on the quality of the optimization results. The experimental evaluation shows that the application of conformance criteria has only a minor impact on the quality of the flight lists. Our results will inform the choice of conformance criteria for the live trials of the TTMS developed in the course of the HARMONIC project.

Keywords: air traffic control, flight prioritization