Air Traffic Flow Management

Ground-holding policies (GHP) in air traffic control aim at trading oft" unavoidable airborne delays for ground delays in order to prevent uncontrollable situations where a number of airplanes is placed in a "holding pattern" over busy destination airports.The fundamental issue in any GHP is to determine which flights should be delayed and for how long. In this paper we address the GHP and propose a finite perturbation analysis (FPA) technique that can be used to dynamically solve the problem.The approach discussed in this paper leads to a control algorithm that achieves a global optimum in the sense that it eliminates airborne delays. Air traffic flow management (ATFM) has been designed based on the approach. The software is based on local area network (LAN). Single PC is installed server program as commanding platform and multiple PCs are installed client program as airplanes. The system includes 3D Airport simulation module, 3D data collecting module, simulated flight module, optimization of flight schedule module and message transmission module.