| Air traffic volume in the United States is increasing steadily. Air traffic congestion is beginning to appear in the en route airspace in addition to airports, and disruptions such as thunderstorms are creating increasingly difficult air traffic management problems.; Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Air traffic managers strategically plan traffic flows on both regional and national levels to prevent demand for airspace from exceeding the capacity of the airspace. They do not currently possess prescriptive tools to aid in making delay and rerouting decisions. These decisions can have an enormous impact on airline operations, yet traffic managers do not explicitly consider airline economics, and airlines do not participate in developing traffic management solutions related to congestion in the en route airspace.; In this dissertation we develop and test two procedures for incorporating airline operating priorities in traffic management decisions. In the first procedure, called the “Centralized Collaborative Traffic Flow Management Procedure,” each airline provides a set of preferred routes for each flight and designates a subset of flights as high priority. We present two mixed integer programming models that traffic managers can use to minimize system-wide delay in an air traffic system with capacity-constrained airspace and airports while considering equity among the airlines. The models enable the global coordination of traffic on a national level.; In the second procedure, called the “Decentralized Collaborative Air Traffic Flow Management Procedure,” the FAA ensures that the demand for airspace does not exceed the capacity of the airspace by allocating time-space partitions of the airspace to individual airlines. Each airline can use its discretion to utilize its allocation of airspace to achieve its operating objectives. We propose an airline-level traffic flow management optimization model to enable the airlines to make intelligent choices regarding which flights to delay or to reroute in order to minimize delay and cancellations and to protect flight connections while adhering to the airspace allocation. Additionally, we propose a linear program that the FAA can use to evaluate candidate airspace allocations to choose an equitable allocation. This procedure is appropriate for local congestion problems such as allocating the airspace surrounding busy airports. |
