Incorporating User Preferences in Time-Based Flow Management Operations

This paper presents results of a simulation of strategies to incorporate business-driven airline preferences in metering operations. Traffic flow systems that balance demand versus capacity at busy airports assign Controlled Times of Arrival (CTAs) to incoming flights. We evaluate a strategy to assign these CTAs based on user-provided priority lists. The user-provided priority is used to drive a slot swapping algorithm that looks for opportunities to rearrange the order of flights in the CTA queue in a way that decreases delay cost. We quantify potential savings by comparing the queue after swapping with the default first-come-first-served rule. Simulations under a variety of realistic scenarios show that our proposed algorithm could reduce delay costs between 1.3% and 17% relative to a baseline where no swapping is performed. Opportunistic swapping, however, presents challenges when handling equity between carriers. Operational considerations and potential solutions to establish equity are discussed.