Title :
A sample path approach for solving the ground-holding policy problem in air traffic control
Author :
Panayiotou, Christos G. ; Cassandras, Christos G.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Manuf. Eng., Boston Univ., MA, USA
fDate :
5/1/2001 12:00:00 AM
Abstract :
Ground-holding policies (GHPs) in air traffic control aim at trading off unavoidable airborne delays for ground delays in order to prevent uncontrollable situations where a number of airplanes is placed in a “holding pattern” over busy destination airports. The fundamental issue in any GHP is to determine which flights should be delayed and for how long. We address the GHP and propose a finite perturbation analysis (FPA) technique that can be used to dynamically solve the problem. We show that our approach leads to a control algorithm that achieves a global optimum in the sense that it eliminates airborne delays. Numerical results are included based on data from Boston´s Logan Airport
Keywords :
air traffic control; computational complexity; discrete event systems; optimisation; Boston Logan Airport; airborne delays; finite perturbation analysis; global optimum; ground delays; ground-holding policy problem; holding pattern; sample path approach; unavoidable airborne delays; Air traffic control; Airplanes; Airports; Costs; Delay; Discrete event systems; FAA; Job shop scheduling; Traffic control; Transportation;
Journal_Title :
Control Systems Technology, IEEE Transactions on