Providing adequate airspace capacity for air traffic demand is one of the biggest challenges in European air traffic management. Capacity must be planned months in advance and there are limited options to adjust it at a short notice to demand which is inherently variable. Insufficient capacity leads to delays and re-routings (with additional greenhouse gas emissions) and excess capacity means underutilised resources – both resulting in higher cost for airspace users. Currently, capacity decisions are decentralized with the air navigation service providers (ANSP) and airspace users making individual choices as to how to navigate through the congested network. The Network Manager has a role to coordinate this demand-capacity balancing (DCB) process but has only limited options to improve the performance of the European network.
The CADENZA project analyzed different conceptual options for improving the current DCB process by making it more network-centric. The aim was to optimise network performance by balancing the cost of capacity provision and associated negative effects of a lack of capacity, i.e., delays, re-routings, and additional greenhouse gas emissions. Several case studies provided quantitative results from different scenarios accounting for real-world uncertainties.
CADENZA showed that – while requiring less sector hours to handle the same traffic volume – network-centric DCB leads to lower delays, fewer re-routings, and greenhouse gas emissions, and thus lower costs for airspace users. The results also showed that sharing available capacities between ANSPs could further reduce costs for airspace users, serving as a hedge against demand variability. Moreover, the CADENZA project developed an innovative charging concept, called ‘trajectory products’. It minimises both the incentives for airspace users to plan longer than necessary routes when capacity is sufficient and the negative effects of lacking capacity by giving them the option to decide how to navigate through portions of congested airspace, which is not the case today.
Benefits
- Better use of capacity
- Lower delays and re-routings
- Reduced greenhouse gas emissions
