More than 5,000 airlines operate globally. They transport people and freight across countries and between continents. Every year, billions of passengers take to the skies on commercial flights. The skies are becoming more and more crowded, and airports only have so much capacity to deal with arriving and departing flights. There are around three million arrival and departure slots at UK airports alone every year. At Heathrow, the UK’s largest airport, for instance, they had more than 9,000 slots a week in 2023 with which to meet the needs and desires of all their airline customers. That may sound like a lot, but demand is greater than supply. Heathrow is just one of many airports worldwide where airline demand for arrival and departure slots exceeds airport capacity for considerable hours of the day. In 2023, 205 airports worldwide were overly congested. These airports are called coordinated airports. The majority – 107 – of the coordinated airports were in Europe, with Heathrow one of eight in the UK. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) are forecasting air passenger growth of 1.5%-3.6% in the next 20 years. Bearing in mind that the increase of demand will outpace the expected increase of supply, the already acute demand-supply imbalance will be exacerbated, affecting airlines, airports, and passengers alike. Therefore, in the short to medium term there is a need to find ways to optimise the allocation of the scarce available airport capacity. It is this issue that we have been looking to address on EPSRC-funded ORMASTER Programme Grant. Our OR-MASTER team – made up of a core team of operational research and air transport experts here at Lancaster, along with computing science researchers at the University of Leicester, and members from Queen Mary University London and Bangor University – have designed mathematical models and algorithms to help improve decision-making for how capacity is allocated to airlines at an airport, and at a network of airports. CONTRIBUTING TO A NEW SYSTEM As it stands, independent authorities allocate these slots at overly congested (coordinated) airports around the world. Airlines cannot simply pick and choose to operate their flights in these airports, and therefore they submit requests to the independent authorities 8 |
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