Network Optimization in Air Traffic Management

Abstract

Many problems in air traffic management have a common aspect: it is required to minimize the lead time of goods and passengers through the system. Each of these elements, while passing through the system, must undergo a given sequence of operations. Operations management procedures in traffic systems are generally based on a planning phase and on a real time one. In the former, items are allocated according to capacity and other regulations (e.g. slot allocation). The latter is based on the idea of pushing items through the system every time this is possible and thus shifting downstream the solution of the conflicts that may happen in the following phases of the operation chain. This looks very similar to the well known push strategies in manufacturing. Nevertheless, in manufacturing environment, pull strategies have often proved to be more effective. On this basis, in this paper, we represent the Flight Information Region (FIR) as a service network, and propose some experiments to verify the effect of pull type strategies in real-time flow management.