A Framework for the Assessment of Collaborative Enroute Resource Allocation Strategies

The Airspace Flow Program (AFP) ground delays flights in order to control their flow through capacity constrained airspace regions. It has been successful in controlling traffic with reasonable delays, but the procedures must be improved upon to handle future projected demands. This paper explores a future AFP where centrally-managed rerouting and user input are incorporated into the initial resource allocations. A modeling framework was developed to evaluate and compare allocation strategies, under differing assumptions about traffic managers’ knowledge about airline flight costs. It is used to quantify tradeoffs regarding the quality and timing of airlines’ input information. Three allocation strategies were developed; they differ with respect to the input requested of airlines, and the resource allocation philosophy. They are assessed based on the total cost impact of the AFP initiative on flight operators. To this end, a flight cost function was developed to represent the cost of delay specific to each flight; it consists of deterministic components to represent what traffic managers know about the airlines, and a stochastic component to represent that which they do not. A numerical example demonstrates the situations under which better information quality could be more desirable than timeliness, and vice versa. Identifying these types of tradeoff points is a key contribution of this research effort.