NLR - TP - 98279 Evolutionary 3 D - air traffic flow management

The increasing amount of air traffic requires more efficient use of airspace. One possible way to do this is to use a new planning model which is called the free-route model. New optimization tools are required to create a planning according to this type of model. We present an evolutionary tool to solve free-route Air Traffic Flow Management problems within a three-dimensional airspace. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first (evolutionary) tool that can solve free-route planning problems involving a few hundred aircraft. The performance of the tool has been tested on a set of randomly generated problem instances, where we were especially interested in the robustness of the tool and the scaling of the amount of computation with respect to the size of the problem instances.