Title: Strategic Air Traffic Planning with an Aggregate Route Model

Speaker: Alessandro Bombelli (UC Irvine) 

Abstract: An aggregate route model for strategic traffic air traffic
flow management is presented. It is an Eulerian flow model, describing
the flow between segments of unidirectional point-to-point
routes. Flight trajectory data are compared using similarity
measures. Spatial similarity is determined using the Frechet distance
and temporal similarity by average ground speed. Agglomerative
hierarchical clustering is used to cluster routes. The optimal number
of cluster is determined comparing performances of four different
indexes. The traffic flow along aggregate routes is modeled as a
network whose dynamics are described by a discrete linear
time-invariant system. The traffic flow controls considered are ground
holding and pre-departure rerouting. The strategic planning problem is
posed as minimizing a weighted linear combination of controls, subject
to sector capacity constraints and takes the form of an integer linear
programming problem.