Modeling Departure Rate Controls for Strategic Flow Contingency Management

Ongoing research is currently focused on the need to improve the strategic traffic flow management decision making processes. The research effort in this paper is part of a greater research initiative aimed at developing quantitative analysis and design capabilities for flow contingency management. In our prior study, a flow-based queuing network model for air traffic management was proposed and various traffic management initiatives were modeled and tested with a realistic traffic and weather scenario. Under a flow-based environment, when there are multiple initiatives proposed that impact more than one departure flow, their interactions become convoluted. Therefore, this paper presents an enhancement to the model for departure controls in order to properly account for operational realities and provide better inputs for the queuing simulation. The goal is to approximate today's execution of departure delay programs in a flow-based model and focuses on correctly capturing the interaction effects when multiple initiatives are present. A mathematical model is formulated to determine time-varying departure rates for individual departure flows. Numerical experiments are conducted on a test network and a nation-wide case. When the multiple initiatives are solved in a coordinated fashion, there exists a tradeoff relationship between system-wide delay savings and balancing delays across multiple flows. The performance of the proposed model in addressing such a tradeoff relationship as well as operational realities is discussed and compared with a native apportioning algorithm.