Contingency plans for air traffic flow and capacity management using constraint programming

We present a constraint-based local search heuristic that contributes to solving the problem of generating contingency plans for air traffic flow and capacity management, which are to be used in the case of a catastrophic infrastructure failure within EUROCONTROL, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation. Experiments with the heuristic, implemented in Comet, on real-world flight plans for the entire European airspace show that it is feasible to automate the development of contingency plans, which is currently done by human experts. This is desirable as the development time goes down from two person months per year to a few CPU hours, and as it allows contingency plans to be generated with an increased frequency.