Coordination of Traffic Flows in the TMA

A number of models and algorithms designed to optimize the management of the terminal area have been presented in the literature and/or have been implemented in some airport. Most of them focus their attention mainly on landing operations, while modeling capabilities concentrate on the runway complex, assumed to be a single runway in the simplest case, or, when necessary, examine specific configurations. In this paper, we propose a modeling approach to coordinate inbound and outbound traffic flows on all the prefixed routes, through a discretization of the whole space terminal area. Several operational constraints, like longitudinal and diagonal separations in particular regions of the airspace and different runway configurations (independent, parallel, crossing), can be represented in a uniform framework. In order to assess the model's capabilities, we describe in detail a case study performed for the Rome Fiumicino airport for which we report also algorithmic results with respect to different performance indices.