A Simultaneous Optimization Model for Airport Network Slot Allocation under Uncertain Capacity

Serious congestion and delay problems exist in most of the busiest airports worldwide because of imbalance between scarce airport slot resources and increasing traffic demand. Various factors, especially weather conditions, exacerbate the demand–capacity imbalance. This paper presents a robust model for simultaneous slot allocation on an airport network in multiple calendar days, considering airport capacity uncertainty. The idea of robust optimization is conducive to sustainable and stable decision-making. Robustness is represented through reducing the potential scheduling conflicts in the worst case. Then the model links the strategic decisions and pre-tactical decisions in air traffic management (ATM) through the tradeoff between strategic discrepancy cost and operational congestion cost. Under the support of the Cplex solver, numerical analyses are taken to validate the characteristics and effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that the proposed model effectively eliminates the existing and potential scheduling conflicts, and makes effective tradeoffs between airline preference and potential airport congestion risk.