A hierarchical approach for air traffic routing and scheduling

Efficient flight routing and scheduling plays an important role in air traffic flow management (ATFM), which aims to maximize the utilization of airport and enroute capacities to ensure safety and efficiency of air transportation. In this paper we first propose a novel discrete-time flow dynamic model for an air traffic network, consisting of airports, waypoints and air links, upon which we formulate an air flow routing and scheduling problem as an integer linear programming problem. Considering the NP-hard nature of the problem, we present a novel hierarchical flow routing and scheduling approach, where the hierarchical architecture is derived naturally from the network containment relationship, and computation is carried out in a bottom-up manner, which relies on an incremental strategy. Upon resulting flow routes and schedules, a heuristic algorithm is carried out to determine flight plans for individual aircraft. The effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical approach is illustrated by realistic air traffic data in four ASEAN Flight Information Regions (FIRs).