Ground Delay Programs: Optimizing over the Included Flight Set Based on Distance

The Ground Delay Program (GDP) is an air traffic flow management mechanism used to decrease the rate of in-coming flights into an airport when it is projected that arrival demand will exceed capacity. Under a GDP, a set of flights destined for a single airport is assigned ground delays. In this paper we investigate how the set of flights to which delays are applied is defined. Specifically, we define a “distance-based” GDP as one that only applies to flights whose origin airports are less than a prescribed distance, d, from the destination airport. This approach is different from the current approach which groups origin airports by air route traffic control center jurisdiction and restricts flight based on a center-based tier system. We also investigate methods for setting the parameter d. We describe the two measures currently used to evaluate GDP options, i.e. unrecoverable delay and average delay, and show how to optimize d based on an objective function defined in terms of these parameters. A new GDP measure, unnecessary delay, which represents the expected cost of ground delay that was unnecessarily assigned is defined. It is shown that this measure provides an improvement over unrecoverable delay.