Solving the multi-airport Ground Holding Problem

The increasing demand for air traffic in the last years has led to a heavier use of airportsand airways, while their capacities have not grown accordingly. The main drawback of thisphenomenon is a situation of congestion in air traffic networks that produces departure delaysand queues before landing, causes large losses to air companies and affects air traffic safety.A way of reducing congestion is to adopt a Ground Holding policy, i.e., to hold on theground a limited number of flights before departure in order to avoid as much as possibleairborne delay. The Ground Holding Problem (GHP) is that of determining a way of distributingdelays to the flights in such a way as to minimize the overall cost of the delays (bothon the ground and in the air). The importance of Ground Holding policies is well recognizedand optimization models have been proposed: unfortunately, it is very difficult to have real,or -even realistic-, GHP instances to evaluate the quality of one procedure over the others.Given this lack of GHP instances, in this paper we introduce 32 new test cases, up to 5000flights on a network of 10 airports, in which congestion is caused by insufficient capacity inarrival airports. These instances (made accessible via ftp) are solved to computationallycompare a new heuristic algorithm with both a previous heuristic and an exact algorithm.The new algorithm we propose is based on -priority rules-, where the flight priority iscomputed as a cost function. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998