A two-stage robust optimisation for terminal traffic flow problem

Airport congestion witnesses potential conflicts: insufficient terminal airspace and delay propagation within scrambled the competition in the terminal manoeuvring area. Re-scheduling of flights is needed in numerous situations, heavy traffic in air segments, holding patterns, runway schedules and airport surface operations. Robust optimisation for terminal traffic flow problem, providing a practical point of view in hedging uncertainty, can leverage the adverse effect of uncertainty and schedule intervention. To avoid delay propagation throughout the air traffic flow network and reduce the vulnerability to disruption, this research adopts a two-stage robust optimisation approach in terminal traffic flow. It further enhances the quality of Pareto-optimality Benders-dual cutting plane based on core point approximation in the second stage recourse decision. The efficiency of the cutting plane algorithm is evaluated by a set of medium sized real-life scenarios. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the well-known Pareto-optimal cuts in Benders-dual method from the literature.