Modelling Reactionary Delays in the European Airport Network

The air transportation network affects yearly over 700 millions of
passengers in the ECAC (European Civil Aviation Conference) area, with
flight delays causing yearly costs - both direct and indirect, such
as missed business opportunities - amounting to billions of euros.

We have developed an agent-based model to study the
propagation of reactionary delays (ie. delays which are transferred
from one flight to another) over the EU airport network, in which
the basic agents are the aircraft and airports, and air traffic is
simulated using aircraft schedules, passenger connectivity patterns
and airport capacities obtained from real data.

This approach has already been followed for both the US and European
airport networks, but large scale simulations of at least several months of
European air traffic, validated through comparison with empirical data,
have not been attempted yet. The reason for this lies in the difficulty
of obtaining high quality, reliable data for the ECAC area, and in the
additional complexity of the European system, which also will be addressed
during this talk.