Demand and Capacity Balancing Through Probabilistic Queuing Theory and Ground Holding Program for European Air Transportation Network

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the effect of local disturbances in European airports over the global delay characteristics of the air traffic network with and without ground holding program. First, the historical air traffic data is used for analyzing the busiest European airports. Then, network models are constructed in order to simulate balancing the demand and capacity and delay propagation across the network under disruptive events. These models, which are stochastic Queuing Network Models (QNM), are used to run in different scenarios where the capacities of airports are reduced to simulate local disturbances (e.g. heavy rain in the airport areas, air traffic controller strikes, etc.). The impact of a local capacity reduction in the airports to the European network are analyzed, and performances of these models, with and without ground holding implementation (i.e. QNM and QNM-GH), are compared.