Implementation of a Long-Range Air Traffic Flow Management for the Asia-Pacific Region

• Main Authors: Michael Schultz, Daniel Lubig, Ehsan Asadi, Judith Rosenow, Eri Itoh, Srinivas Athota, Vu N. Duong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Agent-based simulation; airport performance; flight optimization; flow management; long-range flight regulations
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9529209/

We provide a concept of operations and a corresponding implementation of a long-range air traffic flow management in the Asia-Pacific region. This management will provide an appropriate demand-capacity balancing considering both aircraft sequencing by local arrival management procedures and flow optimization to prevent over-demand in the approach area around the airport. Thus, coordination of long-range international flights demands collaboration between different flight information regions and local regulations. As Singapore Changi Airport is a central element of the Asia-Pacific flow management high share of long-haul air traffic, we use this airport to demonstrate our approach. To derive the operational conditions and actual traffic patterns at the airport, ADS-B messages and flight plan information are processed. The data are cleaned, analyzed, and filtered to provide information about arrival flows within given distances to the airport. We provide an efficacy analysis of the long-range air traffic flow management using two approaches. First, we applied a mixed-integer optimization of time shifts of normal distributed flight times. Here, the regulation of long-range flights by time shifts (e.g., achieved by speed advisories) shows a significant relief from periods of over-demand at the airport approach sector. Second, we implement a reference and a test case scenario in an agent-based simulation environment including the local arrival management procedures. Here, the number of holdings and the associated holding time could be reduced by at least 26%.