Real-time management of air traffic flow based on the Controlled Stochastic Petri Net approach.

Several efforts have been focused on the improvement of the quality of service of air transportation in order to face the increasing of the demand. Consequently, in the latest decade, a growing body of advances concerning several aspects of this transportation mode has appeared in the operation research literature. At the best of our knowledge Stochastic Petri Nets (SPN) have not been yet used for the graphical description, the analysis of flows and the dynamic control of the ground holding problem. Due to the characteristics of the air transportation systems, this paper shows that the Controlled Stochastic Petri Net (CSPN) model of such a system is very efficient. Indeed, the presented CSPN model aims at minimizing simultaneously the airborne and the ground delays, taking into consideration the probabilistic nature of the air traffic. As it is shown, this mathematical tool is very interesting for the real-time scheduling of the plane landing or flight at the airport. The CSPN model of an elementary landing system is described and defined and this paper shows that it has interesting properties. It illustrates the interest of such a tool with a numerical application in which it analyses the optimal solution.