The Air-Route Network Design Problem

— This study concerns the air route network design problem and more precisely the route and level flight assignment problem, which has already become a key issue owing to the growth of air traffic. A number of related problems appear in the operations research literature, notably vehicle routing, scheduling and other transportation problems. The problem studied in this paper concerns the generation of non-colliding, time-dependent routes through a given airspace. This problem can be modeled as a specific flow problem in a given space-time network. We present a deterministic model based on a Linear Programming approach for optimizing the level route assignment in a trajectory-based Air Traffic Management (ATM) environment. This problem can be seen as a multi-period (dynamic) problem and it can be transformed into a static one by using standard technique of time-expanding the underlying network. To handle large instances, we have also proposed and developed a heuristic approach. Some numerical results are given to illustrate the performances of these approaches.