Analysis of congestion pricing model to handle “day of operations” airport capacity reduction

Previous studies have shown that due to high volume of flights among US airports and inefficient allocation of resources, congestion is generated at these airports resulting in loss of billions of dollars to overall economy of the country. In order to manage this congestion, the concerned authorities (and related organizations) are looking into different alternatives to allocate resources more efficiently. Among these resources is the runway access to arriving flights on the “day of operations”, notably when, due to inclement weather (or other factors), the runway capacity decreases below the number of scheduled arrivals. Recent study proposed a runway access allocation system based on the principle of congestion pricing. This method generates both, a complete cost structure of congestion prices and assignment of flights to arrival time slots i.e. access to the runway for the “day of operations”. This research reports the behavior of the model towards the effect of “non-compliance” of airlines with regards to the allocation of runway access to the flights. Preliminary results suggest that the model is robust enough to handle the airline's behavior (of non-compliance) without significant changes in either the generated congestion prices or the adjusted flight schedule.