In Europe, all Air Navigation Service Providers
(ANSPs) finance their activities by charging airlines using their
airspace. These ‘en route charges’ usually account for a significant
part of the cost of a flight, and they can therefore influence
the route choice: airlines may decide to fly longer routes to avoid
countries with higher charges. If ANSPs want to maximize their
revenues, they must choose the optimal charge to impose on their
airspace. We show that this optimal charge can be identified
through a Network Pricing Problem (NPP) formulation in the
form of Bilevel Programming where the leader (i.e. the ANSP)
owns a set of arcs (the airways in its national airspace) and
charges the commodities (i.e. the flights) passing through them.
As the en route charges are proportional to a Unit Rate value
fixed by the ANSP, we are able to apply a similar methodology
as in the case of a single toll arc for the NPP. By exploiting
the structure of the problem, we propose an exact algorithm
to compute the optimal Unit Rate and apply it to a case study
relying on real air traffic data and realistic flight cost figures.
