DYNAMIC GROUND-HOLDING POLICIES FOR A NETWORK OF AIRPORTS

The yearly congestion costs in the U.S. airline industry are estimated to be of the order of $2 billion. In [6] we introduced and studied ge neric integer programming models for the static multi-airport ground-h olding problem (GHP), the problem of assigning optimal ground holding delays in a general network of airports, so that the total (ground plu s airborne) delay cost of all flights is minimized. The present paper is the first attempt to address the multi-airport GHP in a dynamic env ironment. We propose algorithms to update ground-holding decisions as time progresses and more accurate weather (hence capacity) forecasts b ecome available. We propose several pure IP formulations (most of them 0-1), which have the important advantages of being remarkably compact while capturing the essential aspects of the problem and of being suf ficiently flexible to accommodate various degrees of modeling detail. For example, one formulation allows the dynamic updating of the mix be tween departure and arrival capacities by modifying runway use. These formulations enable one to assign and dynamically update ground holds to a sizeable portion of the network of the major congested U.S. or Eu ropean airports. We also present structural insights on the behavior o f the problem by means of computational results, and we find that our methods perform much better than a heuristic which may approximate, to some extent, current ground-holding practices.