Strategic Allocation of Flight Plans in Air Traffic Management: An Evolutionary Point of View

Abstract

We present a simplified model of the strategic allocation of trajectories in a generic airspace for commercial flights. In this model, two types of companies, characterized by different cost functions and different strategies, compete for the allocation of trajectories in the airspace. With an analytical model and numerical simulations, we show that the relative advantage of the two populations—companies—depends on external factors like traffic demand as well as on the composition of the population. We show that there exists a stable equilibrium state which depends on the traffic demand. We also show that the equilibrium solution is not the optimal at the global level, but rather that it tends to favour one of the two business models—the archetype for low-cost companies. Finally, linking the cost of allocated flights with the fitness of a company, we study the evolutionary dynamics of the system, investigating the fluctuations of population composition around the equilibrium and the speed of convergence towards it. We prove that in the presence of noise due to finite populations, the equilibrium point is shifted and is reached more slowly.