Causal Analysis of Airline Trajectory Preferences to Improve Airspace Capacity

The problem of fitting the maximum number of aircraft into ATC sectors, keeping in mind aircraft separation and safety standards, area navigation direct routings and other factors, is known as the airspace capacity problem. Above the European airspace, a high density network of air traffic can be found which is determined by the workload of controllers. Constraint Programming (CP) is a powerful powerful paradigm for representing and solving a wide range of combinatorial problems. The PARTAKE project fosters adherence of air space user's trajectory preferences enhancing Trajectory Based Operations (TBO) concepts by identifying tight interdependencies between trajectories and introducing a new mechanism to improve aircraft separation at the hot spots by the mean of CP. The underlying philosophy is to capitalize present freedom degrees between layered ATM planning tools, when sequencing departures at airports by considering the benefits of small time stamp changes in the assigned slot departures.