A sample path approach for solving the ground-holding policy problem in air traffic control

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.