A comparison of formulations for the single-airport ground-holding problemwith banking constraints

Both the single-airport ground-holding problem (GH) and the multi-airport g round-holding problem can be extended by the addition of banking constraint s to accommodate the hubbing operations of major airlines. These constraint s enforce the desire of airlines to land certain groups of flights, called banks, within fixed time windows, thus preventing the propagation of delays throughout their entire operation. GH can be formulated as a transportatio n problem and readily solved. But in the presence of banking constraints, G H becomes a difficult integer programming problem. In this paper, we constr uct five different models of the single-airport ground-holding problem with banking constraints (GHB). The models are evaluated both computationally a nd analytically. For two of the models, we show that the banking constraint s induce facets of the convex hull of the set of integer solutions. In addi tion, we explore a linear transformation of variables and a branching techn ique.