INESC TEC develops project to improve the airport management

Nowadays, the major worldwide and national airports face a great challenge, consisting in the demand for an economic solution that solves its traffic problems. The new project entitled ASAP - Airport Slot Allocation Processes in which INESC TEC’s Centre for Industrial Engineering and Management (CEGI) participates, intends to address that challenge.

In order to operate at the airports, an airline needs to have a landing slot to schedule the landing or the departure of each flight. In the more congested airports, the allocation of slots is made by the coordinating authorities who follow complex priority rules defined by IATA (International Air Transport Association). These rules are embedded in specialized applications that currently don’t have strong optimisation abilities, which can easily lead to the slot allocation decisions not being the best ones.

The main goals of the new project ASAP are the development of a new optimisation approach consistent with the IATA’s slot allocation rules and the assessment of the consequences of the modification of those rules on the use of airport capacity. The results will be assessed based on the real data from the Madeira, Porto, Lisbon and São Paulo airports.

In order to develop this project, it was created a team based on two Portuguese research units, CITTA (Research Centre for Territory, Transports and Environment) and INESC TEC alongside with two international consultants of MIT and Carnegie-Mellon. The team also relies on the collaboration of ANA and ANAC, the slot coordination entities of Portugal and Brazil, respectively.

The project ASAP - Airport Slot Allocation Processes: Development in Current Guidelines and Current Practices, is supported by the COMPETE 2020 programme under the Support System for Scientific and Technological Research (SAIC) in a EUR 239M investment of which EUR 203M corresponds to a FEDER incentive.