Privacy and Stability in Airport Ground Delay Programs

Adverse weather can reduce airport capacity. When the number of arriving aircraft exceeds this reduced capacity, flights can get delayed. A Ground Delay Program (GDP) is a strategy by which aircraft landing slots can be redistributed so that the flights are delayed on the ground itself and not in the air. This increases safety, reduces the fuel consumption and hence the operating costs for airlines. In this paper, we present six algorithms that perform this slot reassignment. These algorithms differ in the extent to which slots can get re-arranged in real-time and the amount of information that the airlines must reveal to the central planner during the implementation. These two features of the algorithm are called as stability and privacy respectively. The efficiency of these six algorithms, measured in terms of the expected delay cost for flights, is compared using operational data for La Guardia Airport in New York. A two-step Receding Horizon Static (2-step RHS) model is shown to be a good compromise based on present expectations of privacy and stability in the system.