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Many thanks to the anonymous referees for their useful feedback. The first and second authors wish to thank Jean-Marc Alliot and Nicolas Durand, who were heads of the Global Optimization Laboratory at the late French Civil Aviation Research Centre (Centre d’Études de la Navigation Aérienne), for having introduced us to the ATM optimization realm, and Jean-Marc Garot, former head of the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre in Brétigny, for helping us acquire some perspective on the subject during USA/Europe ATM Research and Developement Seminars. The third and fourth authors thank Mete Çeliktin, Søren Dissing, Carlos Garcia-Avello, Bernard Delmée, Jacques Lematre, and Patrick Tasker of EUROCONTROL Headquarters, as well as Franck Ballerini, Marc Bisiaux, Marc Bourgois, Marc Dalichampt, Hamid Kadour, Bernard Kerstenne, Serge Manchon, Elisabeth Petit, and Leïla Zerrouki at the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre, for many stimulating discussions and the provision of exciting ATM problems and data sets.
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Vertical distances are expressed in FLs, one FL corresponding to the nominal altitude of 100 ft = 30.48 m above the international standard pressure datum of 1013.25 hPa (the average sea-level pressure). Authorised cruise flight levels are usually positioned every 1000 ft, that is at multiples of 10 (e.g., FL 290, FL 300, FL 310, etc.).
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Current avionic systems based on a global navigation satellite system like GPS make use of augmentation services, like the European geostationary navigation overlay service, which has been operational for aviation since March 2011 (in particular for the precise vertical positioning required by IFR precision approaches before landing), in order to improve signal accuracy and reliability.
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Elementary sectors may actually have a more complex shape than simple cylinders and be made up of several vertically stacked adjacent cylinders.
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For instance, a sector regulated during 2 hours with a capacity of 30 flights per hour would have 60 slots, one every 2 minutes.
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At the biggest airports, ground movements are managed by an independent unit in order to reduce the workload of controllers.
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The core area is the part of airspace located on the London–Frankfurt–Rome axis, where traffic density is the highest in Europe.
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Not all subsets of elementary sectors may be used as a group of sectors, for obvious reasons like connectivity, or more subtle ones like the qualification of a controller being limited to given volumes of airspace.
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Large airports can operate two or more runways at a time.
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 2012 Cambridge University Press
Cyril Allignol, Nicolas Barnier, Pierre Flener, Justin Pearson. 2012. Constraint programming for air traffic management: a survey
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