The flow management problem: recent computational algorithms

The air traffic flow management problem, together with various policies to address it, is described. A survey of optimization algorithms for the ground holding (and ``free flight'') policies is provided. An exact algorithm, based on the integration of a heuristic algorithm with an integer linear programming model is presented next. This approach provides exact solutions in a much shorter computational time than previous algorithms proposed in the literature. Computational results for large size instances with over 20,000 flights based on the OAG data for a full day in the USA Air Traffic Network are reported