Multi-Airport Ground Holding Problem: A Heuristic Approach Based on Priority Rules

Abstract

In recent years, many sophisticated mathematical models have been proposed to address the problem of reducing congestion at major airports by means of Ground Holding (GH) Policies, i.e., by imposing a ground delay to selected aircraft in order to reduce and possibly to avoid airborne delays and congestion. These models, which are usually optimization models, have found little application in practice so far, probably because they are not easy to understand. In this paper we introduce and analyze a family of simple, easy to understand, heuristics. Each heuristic is based on a specific “priority rule”. The flights are grouped dynamically into a manageable number of classes. Each “priority rule” specifies, for any two flights of different classes, which one has priority over the other. The performances of the proposed heuristics are compared among themselves, and with that of an “optimal” policy, on a set of test problems.