Leveraging Demand-Capacity Balancing to Reduce Air Traffic Emissions and Improve Overall Network Performance

Abstract

Next to the development of more energy-efficient aircraft and alternative jet fuels, improvements in air traffic management (ATM) constitute a key lever to reduce aviation emissions in the future. In this paper, we analyse two demand and capacity management mechanisms that aim at improving flight efficiency and reducing emissions in European ATM: network-oriented capacity decisions and trajectory-independent airport- pair charging. Today, many flights in Europe are diverted from shorter trajectories due to insufficient capacities in the network. We therefore propose to explicitly include both network effects and emissions in order to make better, network-oriented capacity decisions. On the demand side, the current airspace charging scheme in some cases unintentionally incentivises airspace users (AUs) to fly on longer trajectories to avoid countries with high en-route charges. We therefore analyse the effect of a trajectory- independent airport-pair charging scheme (instead of country-specifi c airspace charges) that align the incentive of AUs with the environment when making their trajectory choice. Both measures aim at reducing the costs created for the network (in terms of delay and rerouting cost) and the environment. The mechanisms are tested on a realistically-sized case study covering 3,000-4,000 flights in large parts of Western European airspace. We fi nd that central capacity planning can reduce variable network cost by 21% and emissions from detours by almost 64%. Furthermore, airport-pair charging can save almost 11% of variable network cost and up to 320,000 tons of CO2 emissions if accompanied by capacity changes that reflect the shift in demand towards shorter trajectories.

Keywords: air traffic management, capacity planning, demand-capacity balancing, aviation emissions