Constraint programming for air traffic management: a survey1

Air traffic management (ATM) under its current paradigm is reaching its structural limits considering the continuously growing demand. The need for a decrease in traffic workload opens numerous problems for optimization, from capacity balancing to conflict solving, using many different degrees of freedom, such as re-routing, flight-level changes, or ground-holding schemes. These problems are usually of a large dimension (there are 30 000 daily flights in Europe in the year 2012) and highly combinatorial, hence challenging for current problem solving technologies. We give brief tutorials on ATM and constraint programming (CP), and survey the literature on deploying CP technology for modelling and solving combinatorial problems that occur in an ATM context.