Estimating one-parameter airport arrival capacity distributions for air traffic flow management

During instances of capacity-demand imbalances, efficient plan-ning and decision-making in air traffic flow management is contingent upon the “goodness ” of the capacity distributions that estimate air-port capacity over time. Airport capacities are subject to substantial uncertainty as they depend on stochastic weather conditions. In this paper, we develop models that take into consideration the stochastic nature of weather. The main objective of this paper is the develop-ment of probabilistic capacity forecasts. To assess the improvements that could be gained by using the capacity probabilistic forecasts, the capacity distributions developed in this paper are input into existing static, stochastic, ground holding models, which uses probabilistic ca-pacity forecasts and determines the amount of ground delay to assign to incoming flights. 1