A Dynamical Programming-Based Method to Generate Control Strategy for Air Traffic Flow

With the rapidly increasing of air traffic demand, air traffic problems are surfaced gradually, where the problems include air traffic control load, air traffic congestion, and the demand-capacity imbalances problem. And, the demand-capacity imbalances are typically occurred in the convection weather conditions. In this paper, a method based on dynamical programming is proposed to generate flow control strategy for flights that enter into a sector whose capacity is decreased from the normal operation capacity due to the convective weather. What is more, the air traffic flow from different directions are controlled in a more safe and efficient manner by restricting the maximum allowed number of flights and the minimal time interval between every two adjacent flights with minimization of delay cost. Experimental results show that, compared with the Rate-based method and Need-based method, the proposed method can reduce the average cost by 8.2% and 7.3%, respectively.