ASPaeroFlow: A Heuristic for Joint Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management

A novel heuristic named ASPaeroFlow has been introduced to tackle the simultaneous optimization of Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) and Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC), which are usually managed independently in Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management (ATFCM) operations. This separation leads to a circular dependency between fixed-capacity and fixed-demand assumptions. While joint optimization can resolve this issue, the expanded search space renders exact models computationally impractical for medium to large instances. ASPaeroFlow integrates instance-space decomposition heuristics with a local exact method utilizing Answer Set Programming. It was tested across various instance sizes, from small to industry-scale, and compared against exact and alternative methods. Findings suggest it strikes a balance between exact techniques and operational standards. The paper can be found on arXiv with the identifier 2608.09315.