In this chapter, we present the airport capacity allocation problem, i.e., the problem of finding for each time unit the optimal balance between the number of arrivals and departures in order to reduce the total economic loss over a given decision horizon. In this class of problem, airport capacity is represented by an arrival-departure capacity curve or envelope. Therefore, arrival and departure capacities are considered as interdependent variables whose values depend on the arrival/departure ratio of total airport operations.

We formalise both the single-airport and the multi-airport version of the problem. In particular, for the single-airport capacity allocation problem, we present a dynamic programming formulation solved by using a customised algorithm. For the multi-airport version we propose a integer programming formulation, since some of the properties of the single-airport capacity allocation problem break down when dealing with a network structure. We solve this version of the problem using the CPLEX branch and bound. Computational results are given for both versions of the problem.