Air Traffic Management: Airport Operations

Dear Colleagues,

In a world more and more driven toward globalization and requiring ever increasingly rapid responses, transport systems with high capacity and high speed such as air transportation address the growing mobility need of people and goods by bundling demand from dispersed origin-destination pairs to a set of interconnecting lines and moving them fast. In recent years, demand for air transportation has grown, increasing the workload of air traffic controllers to manage transport flows while ensuring safety and efficiency of operations. Airports are the backbone of the whole air transportation systems, representing also important inter-modality links for quickly moving passengers and goods. However, they can also create bottlenecks in the network. Managing as best as possible and optimizing airport operations is thus a key element for the health of the overall system. While the pandemic has obviously impacted the aviation industry, generating a forced decline in people travels, it has also created new problems and challenges, which will pair up with already existing ones once the situation will stabilize. The aim of this Special Issue is to gather meaningful contribution to the literature regarding the management and optimization of airports operations, with a particular focus in the use of operation research, Artificial Intelligence, data science, simulation and optimization techniques, both when considering a single airport but also in terms of cooperation among multiple ones. As such, this Special Issue covers topics including but not limited to the following:

• Airport efficiency
• Optimization of take-off and landing operation management
• Green operations
• Handling of uncertainty in airport operations
• Passenger connection management
• Disruption management both from airlines and air traffic control perspectives
• Gate assignment
• Taxing and ground operations and possible delay strategies
• Baggage and cargo management
• Check-in operations and crowd management
• Airlines hub-and-spoke networks
• Inter-modality passengers and cargo connectivity

Dr. Marcella Samà
Dr. Zhouchun Huang
Dr. Alexei Sharpanskykh
Guest Editors

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• airport efficiency
• terminal control area management
• air traffic control
• air traffic transportation
• inter-modality
• airlines hub management