Probabilistic Analysis of Ground-Holding Strategies

The Ground-Holding Policy Problem (GHPP) has become a matter of great interest in recent years because of the high cost incurred by aircraft suffering from delays. Ground-holding keeps a flight on the ground at the departure airport if it is known it will be unable to land at the arrival airport. The GBPP is determining how many flights should be held on the ground before take-off and for how long, in order to minimize the cost of delays. When the uncertainty associated with airport landing capacity is considered, the GHPP becomes complicated. A decision support system that incorporates this uncertainty, solves the GHPP quickly, and gives good results would be of great help to air traffic management. The purpose of this thesis is to modify and analyze a probabilistic ground-holding algorithm by applying it to two common cases of capacity reduction. A graphical user interface was developed and sensitivity analysis was done on the algorithm, in order to see how it may be implemented in practice. The sensitivity analysis showed the algorithm was very sensitive to the number of probabilistic capacity scenarios used and to the cost ratio of air delay to ground delay. The algorithm was not particularly sensitive to the number of periods that the time horizon was divided into. In terms of cost savings, a ground-holding policy was the most beneficial when demand greatly exceeded airport capacity. When compared to other air traffic flow strategies, the ground-holding algorithm performed the best and was the most consistent under various situations. The algorithm can solve large problems quickly and efficiently on a personal computer.