A decision making approach at an air highway ramp

In order to alleviate the increasingly serious air traffic congestion problem, a new airspace structure named air highway was proposed by researchers, who have been designing and improving the operation methods and rules for air highway ever since. According to the operation characteristics of air highway, this paper proposes a slot allocation method for aircraft to enter an air highway. Taking into consideration the delay costs and route utilization costs for both the air highway and the conventional route, a mathematical decision making model based on the minimum cost is established, and the appropriate algorithm is described. In the last section this paper presents a simulation case, which calculates the times for aircraft to enter the air highway and provides the results of using the decision making model. The simulation results show that the model and algorithm are effective.