Response mechanisms for dynamic air traffic flow management

Michael O. Ball, Robert Hoffman, David J. Lovell, and Avijit Mukherjee

Proceedings of the 2005 Air Traffic Management Research and Development Seminar, Baltimore, MD, 2005.

ABSTRACT

Dealing with uncertainty and changing conditions represents a major challenge in air traffic flow management (ATFM). We use the newly developed slot credit substitution (SCS) mechanism as a prototypical example to understand how fast-response, dynamic mechanisms can improve ATFM performance. We develop a quantitative model that estimates the difference in impact of a batch-oriented periodic process and a fast-response asynchronous process and describe some key properties of fast-response mechanisms derived from the SCS case.