Adaptative air traffic network: Statistical regularities in air traffic management

Abstract

Starting from traffic data on flights trajectories-planned and actual ones-in Europe, we build a navigation point network. We study this network which exhibits different features for different European countries. In particular, some countries uses a high number of navpoints, facilitating the planning of the flight plan by air companies at the cost of higher concentrations of traffic in few nodes. Making use of the deviations from the planned trajectories, we find that once again different countries have different control procedures with respect to traffic management. Interestingly, we find that some countries tend to make more deviations when the traffic conditions are low. Moreover, they tend to concentrate the deviations in a few number of nodes, especially during daytime. Finally, the position of these key navigation points are sometimes stable over the days, which shows a consistent use of some navpoint for the same kind of rerouting operations.