Air traffic management at Sydney with cancellations and curfew penalties

Ground holding is the practice of keeping an aircraft grounded at its airport of origin if it is apparent that its destination airport would otherwise have insufficient capacity for the level of traffic. A basic ground holding model can be found in Navazio and Romanin-Jacur [7] (the NR J model). Experimental results obtained by testing the NRJ model with generated schedules that resemble the traffic pattern at Sydney airport in Australia [5] indicate that delay reductions ranging from 11% to 19% may be achievable through the use of ground holding strategies. In this paper, we develop an enhanced model that includes additional features of air traffic at Sydney. Firstly, we allow a flight to be cancelled if its arrival would otherwise be delayed beyond a reasonable upper bound. Secondly, we discourage flight arrivals during the airport's curfew hours by imposing a penalty for such arrivals. Using the AMPL and CPLEX packages, the NRJ and our enhanced model are tested under various weather scenarios with actual Sydney airport schedules for a busy weekday. The enhanced model performs better than the NRJ model for most weather scenarios. Furthermore, it produces a feasible solution for another scenario where the NRJ model does not. As the airport capacity drops, the enhanced model outperforms the NRJ model more significantly.