Using Flight Shifting to Mitigate Delay in Multiple Airport Regions

This study aims to improve operational performance of a multiple airport region (MAR) by analyzing interdependent capacity scenarios of that MAR airports and redistributing airport traffic to make more efficient use of the available capacity. We propose to shift flights between MAR airports in order to reduce flight delays. Both the deterministic and stochastic versions of a flight shift model are formulated as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP). The proposed methodology is applied to New York MAR, which includes five airports, using data for the year 2015. The deterministic model is applied to short-term flight reassignment where the MAR capacity scenario is known and flights are re-assigned on the day of operations, while the stochastic model is applied to re-assign flights in the original flight schedule based on capacity scenario probabilities. Results of both models show that by rescheduling flight landing airport and landing time, the total flight delay in the New York MAR could be significantly reduced, even when a high airport reassignment cost is assumed.