Determining
the number of airport arrival slots
Andrew M. Churchill,
David J. Lovell, Avijit Mukherjee, and Michael O.
Ball
Transportation Science, Vol.
47, No. 4, pp. 526-541, 2013.
At many congested airports, access rights are governed by a system of slot
controls. A slot conveys to its owner the right to schedule an operation
(flight arrival or departure). In this paper, stochastic optimization models
are developed to determine the numbers of slots to make available over the
course of a day, controlling for the long-term uncertainty induced in arrival
or departure capacities because of weather conditions. Three related integer
programming formulations for this problem are presented, which vary both in
their computational properties and the economic trade-offs modeled. The models
are compared both analytically and computationally. Experiments using data from
New York's LaGuardia Airport are reported to demonstrate the impact of these models
on optimizing slot profiles while considering long-term capacity uncertainty
and several policy objectives.