Air Robust Routes: analysis of the direct costs

Airline costs, as well as airspace safety, are deeply influenced by congestion in the air traffic network. Congestion are due to the limited capacity of the control points (airports or fixed points) of the network, that is bounded by a maximum number of aircraft that can fly on them in the same time interval. Control points capacity can change real time due to unforeseen events, such as weather condition changes. Its reduction usually implies real time managing operations that consist either in rerouting the aircraft, with respect to the nominal shortest route, or in postponing departures: in any case additional costs are implied. Instead of the shortest route, we propose to assign to each flight the shortest robust route, that for each network point has a valid alternative route that allows the aircraft to reach the destination within a certain known time limit. In this paper we give the definition of the robust routes and the main implementation details. We also make a preliminary analysis of the direct costs of the robust routes with respect to the shortest ones.