On the statistical description of the inbound air traffic over Heathrow airport

TL;DR

This paper introduces a statistical model for inbound air traffic at Heathrow Airport, accurately capturing traffic patterns and demonstrating robustness against real-world data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel statistical model that effectively describes inbound air traffic at a congested hub, validated with real data from Heathrow Airport.

Findings

Model accurately fits observed traffic distribution

Demonstrates robustness of the model

Provides insights into congestion dynamics

Abstract

We present a model to describe the inbound air traffic over a congested hub. We show that this model gives a very accurate description of the traffic by the comparison of our theoretical distribution of the queue with the actual distribution observed over Heathrow airport. We discuss also the robustness of our model.