Are All the Requested Air Traffic Flow Management Regulations Actually Indispensable?

The most common air traffic flow management measure used by the European Network Manager to resolve overloads (i.e., imbalances between demand and capacity) consists of imposing air traffic flow management regulations, which delay fights on ground using the first-come, first-served principle. During busy days, the number of regulations coordinated between the Network Manager operations centre and the flow management positions could be high. In this situation, fights may be subject to several regulations simultaneously. The interactions between regulations, which depend on the fights that have in common, are complex and extremely difficult to predict. This paper is founded on the hypothesis that, during busy days, some of the requested air traffic flow management regulations could be avoided without generating overloads elsewhere in the network. The problem of identifying whether a regulation is essential or not is addressed by using the adaptive tabu search algorithm and the strategic oscillations principle. The performance of the proposed algorithm is assessed by replaying one of the busiest days of 2019.