ABSTRACT
Congestion and aircraft/ight delays in the air transport systems of both Europe and US have generally increased over the past decade. The most obvious have been growing demand, constrained infrastructure capacity, and unplanned disruptions of airline schedules (Janic, 2003). The congestion and delays due to an imbalance between air transport demand and infrastructure capacity has generally been alleviated by improvements in the utilization of existing capacity, physical expansion of infrastructure, and demand management. The rst option has shown to have limited effects. In many cases, implementation of the second option has been difcult or even impossible at least in the short-term due to the various political and environmental constraints in terms of noise, air pollution and land use. The last option, demand management has recently been considered a potentially viable option to relieve the congestion problem (Adler, 2001; DeCota, 2001; FAA, 2001).
