Flight Prioritization and Turnaround Recovery

The SESAR ATM Master Plan describes the goal to fully integrate airports into the ATM network, such that airspace user operations are facilitated and related user costs are reduced. The corresponding flight prioritization mechanisms of the user-driven prioritization process are in the process of being validated at several airports across Europe. This article studies the benefits of the underlying concept of tactical ATFCM slot swapping in relation to resource-constrained turnaround management of an airline. A case study at Frankfurt airport analyses different situations in which the airport is expected to operate with reduced capacity, such that a local hub carrier can prioritize its arrival (and departure) flights. Results indicate that arrival slot swapping in constraints is very efficient as long as fixed departure flights of the same aircraft obtain no critical delays for the downstream network. In our case study, such critical delays for the network occur at around 60 minutes of departure delay, such that flights which are assigned with higher delays require the additional flexibility of departure slot swapping in order to achieve significant cost reductions. We further find that optimal delay margins, which are calculated with our approach, suffice for the confidential communication of flight priorities, such that complex scoring and credit trading systems might be omitted. In exchange, we propose a secondary trading scheme, for which our model can define efficient slot prices while considering operational constraints of an airline.