Article ID: | iaor20101944 |
Volume: | 44 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 1 |
End Page Number: | 14 |
Publication Date: | Feb 2010 |
Journal: | Transportation Science |
Authors: | Hoffman Robert, Ball Michael O, Mukherjee Avijit |
Keywords: | congestion, traffic management |
This paper presents ration-by-distance (RBD), a new allocation method to be used in planning ground delay programs (GDPs) for traffic flow management. It is shown that RBD minimizes total expected delay, under certain assumptions related to the manner in which GDPs are dynamically controlled. On the other hand, RBD taken to the extreme has poor characteristics with respect to the equity of the allocation it produces. To address this issue, we propose a constrained version of RBD as a practical alternative to allocation procedures used in operations today. It is shown that this algorithm has superior overall performance in terms of efficiency and equity relative to existing procedures.