Strategic allocation of flight plans: an evolutionary point of view

TL;DR

This paper models strategic airline behavior in airspace allocation, analyzing how different company types compete and reach equilibrium, revealing that delays are preferred over longer routes and that noise affects convergence.

Contribution

It introduces an evolutionary model of airline trajectory choices, highlighting the impact of traffic demand, airport number, and noise on equilibrium and dynamics.

Findings

Equilibrium favors delaying departure over longer routes.

Noise shifts the equilibrium point.

Convergence to equilibrium is slower with fluctuations.

Abstract

We consider the simplified model of strategic allocation of trajectories in the airspace presented in a previous publication. Two types of companies, characterized by different cost functions, compete for allocation of trajectories in the airspace. We study how the equilibrium state of the model depends on the traffic demand and number of airports. We show that in a mixed population environment the equilibrium solution is not the optimal at the global level, but rather than it tends to have a larger fraction of companies who prefer to delay the departure time rather taking a longer routes. Finally we study the evolutionary dynamics investigating the fluctuations of airline types around the equilibrium and the speed of convergence toward it in finite populations. We find that the equilibrium point is shifted by the presence of noise and is reached more slowly.