SOSTA: an effective model for the Simultaneous Optimisation of airport SloT Allocation

Air traffic demand has been increasing over the years and is still expected to grow. At airports where capacity is scarce, the current practice is to quantify it in terms of “slots” and is allocated, especially in Europe, following administrative procedures and best practices. The current slot allocation process is long, non optimised, and requires a large amount of communications among airspace users and slot coordinators. In this paper, we propose SOSTA, an integer linear programming model for optimisation of the slot allocation process on the European scale. In addition to applying all the regulations and best practices currently in use, SOSTA deals with all airports simultaneously, which may strongly increase the effectiveness of the early allocation phases. In an experimental analysis based on the real data of the busiest day in 2013 air traffic, we show the benefits of this simultaneous allocation, along with the capabilities of SOSTA and its extremely good computational performance.