THE FLOW MANAGEMENT PROBLEM - RECENT COMPUTATIONAL ALGORITHMS

The air traffic flow management problem, together with various policie s to address it, is described in this paper. A survey of optimization algorithms for the ground-holding (and 'free flight') policies is prov ided. An exact algorithm, based on the integration of a heuristic algo rithm with an integer linear programming model is presented next. This approach provides exact solutions in a much shorter computational tim e than previous algorithms proposed in the literature. Computational r esults for large-size instances with over 20 000 flights based on the OAG data for a full day in the USA air traffic network are reported. ( C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.