A recursion event-driven model to solve the single airport ground-holding problem

The yearly congestion costs in the U.S airline industry are estimated to be more than three billions. In China, the delay problem caused by air congestion also becomes more and more serious. An effective method for reducing the delay cost in air traffic flow management is by using ground-holding policy. When numbers of flights are big, it is difficult to calculate the real-time solution of it. A new recursion event-driven model is presented in this paper considering different delay cost. Discrete-event analyze method has been used to solve the single airport ground-holding problem. The concept of delay time equivalent quantity has been presented to solve the combination optimization problem and a fast algorithm was given basing on it. The simulation results validate the feasibility of the proposed model and algorithm.