Algorithms for single- and multiple-runway Aircraft Landing Problem

The Aircraft Landing Problem is the problem of allocating an airport's runways to arriving aircraft as well as scheduling the landing time of aircraft, with the objective of minimizing total deviations from the target landing times. This work proposes new approaches to solve the Aircraft Landing Problem. The distinguishing factors of the proposed approaches include separating sequencing and scheduling decisions, decomposing the problem into smaller sub-problems, and restricting aircraft allocations to runways. We show that the combination of these factors into the proposed algorithms are very effective in solving the problem in a short time. Our work is motivated by the dynamic nature of the problem, i.e. due to the continuous changes in the number of arriving flights, and a short window for determining the landing schedules, the air traffic controllers will need to re-solve the problem on a regular basis and update the landing schedules, and fast and effective algorithms are therefore paramount. By solving a set of 49 benchmark instances we demonstrate that we fulfill this aim, and that the proposed methods obtain satisfactory solutions in a short amount of time.

Article

Download

View Algorithms for single- and multiple-runway Aircraft Landing Problem