Critical Flights Detected with Time Windows

Airlines need to pay special attention to flights that may be liable to produce undesired downstream effects if subject to delays. This paper proposes a mathematical formulation to identify these critical flights by defining a set of temporal intervals, called time windows, which must be met during the flight execution. The width of the time windows is variable as it reflects all known constraints on runway capacities and/or on congested en-route sectors that the flight will go through. We choose the set of optimal time windows that maximizes their overall width, thus providing airline operators with the largest degree of flexibility to perform their flights. We present three possible approaches to compute the utilization of the system capacity. By means of a computational analysis, we show that the solution of the time window model is insensitive with respect to the formulation used for the capacity constraints.