Evaluation of air traffic network resilience: a UK case study
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Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
With growing air travel demand, weather disruptions cost millions in flight delays and cancellations. Current resilience analysis research has been focused on airports and airlines, rather than the en-route waypoints, and has failed to consider the impact of disruption scenarios. This paper analyses the resilience of the United Kingdom (UK) air traffic network to weather events that disrupt the network’s high-traffic areas. A Demand and Capacity Balancing (DCB) model is used to simulate adverse weather and re-optimise the cancellation, delay, and rerouting of flights. The model’s feasibility and effectiveness were evaluated under 20 concentrated and randomly occurring extreme disruption scenarios, lasting 2 h and 4 h. The results show that the network is vulnerable to extended weather events that target the network’s most central waypoints. However, the network demonstrates resilience to weather disruptions lasting up to two hours, maintaining operational status without any flight cancellations. As the scale of disruption increases, the network’s resilience decreases. Notably, there exists a threshold beyond which further escalation in disruption scale does not significantly impair the network’s performance.
Date Issued
2024-11
Date Acceptance
2024-11-07
Citation
Aerospace, 2024, 11 (11)
ISSN
2226-4310
Publisher
MDPI AG
Journal / Book Title
Aerospace
Volume
11
Issue
11
Copyright Statement
Copyright: © 2024 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
License URL
Identifier
https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4310/11/11/921
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
921
Date Publish Online
2024-11-08