A Two-Phase Optimization Method of Generating Control Strategy for Air Traffic Flow

With the rapidly increasing of air traffic demand, the demand-capacity imbalances problem of sector is surfaced gradually, and typically occurred in the convection weather conditions. In this paper, given the sector capacity of different time periods, a two-phase optimization framework is proposed to generate flow control strategy for flights from different corridors to achieve the demand-capacity balance. In the first phase, the sector capacity of all time periods are taken as a whole, and then a dynamical programming-based method is proposed to allocate the overall sector capacity for different corridors, roughly. In the second phase. a backtracking method is taken to determine the optimal control strategy for all corridors with minimization of delay cost, where the control strategy includes two restrictions that the maximum allowed number of flights across a corridor and the minimal time interval between every two adjacent flights from the same corridor in each time period. In addition, a 0-1 combination algorithm is used to determine the maximum allowed number of flights in each time period for each corridor. Experimental results show that, compared with the Rate-based method and Need-based method, the proposed method can reduce the average delay cost by 9.1% and 5.2%. respectively.