Assessing stakeholder impacts of capacity regulations and algorithmic capacity-on-demand mechanisms in European air traffic management: A network-level ECAC operational case study
比较欧洲空中交通管理中传统管制机制与一种基于提前委派飞机的算法化容量平衡方法，评估其对航空公司、乘客、机场和导航服务提供者的不同影响，发现后者能减少延误传播和成本。
Regulatory mechanisms in European air traffic management, including Air Traffic Flow Management slot allocation and flow restrictions, are widely used to address sector-level demand-capacity imbalances. Although effective for safety and feasibility, they impose departure delays that propagate through airline rotations, increasing costs, reducing passenger reliability, and disrupting airport operations. Standard Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management assessments mainly report regulation compliance and aggregate delay, without explicitly assessing network propagation or differentiated stakeholder impacts. This paper compares the regulatory baseline with an algorithmic demand-capacity balancing approach based on early delegation of clusters of aircraft to adjacent sectors. Under congestion, control of eligible aircraft is proactively reassigned to reshape sector occupancy profiles and balance workload across neighboring sectors, without changing traffic demand or declared capacities. A stakeholder-oriented framework evaluates impacts on airlines, passengers, airports, and air navigation service providers, combining monetized indicators with proxy metrics where valuation is not feasible. Results indicate that early delegation substantially reduces the need for sector-level Air Traffic Controller capacity regulations, lowering direct and reactionary delay and associated costs. Reduced delay propagation is associated with more stable schedules and a smoother temporal distribution of demand for airport infrastructure and services. Overall, rigid regulation-driven allocation can create system-level inefficiencies even when safety constraints are satisfied. Adaptive, data-driven balancing mechanisms show potential to improve efficiency and to alter the distribution of congestion-related impacts, informing policy discussions on the evolution of demand-capacity management in European air traffic systems.