A Flight Ground-Waiting Time Threshold Optimization Model

Abstract

The number of flight is increasing sharply with sustainable development of civil aviation enterprise in China, which causes a lot of fuel consumption and pollution emissions in the process of launching control, aircraft taxiing and taking off. Unreasonable waiting arrangement will also reduce the comfort of the passengers, which leads to the economic losses of air transport. By analyzing the process of flight, it was found that each flight would experience the queuing twice before entering the taxiway and at the end of the taxiway, respectively. In this study, a few key time parameters were determined to calculate the arrival rate and service time during the two queuing process, including flight pushback time (FPT), taxiway entrance service time (TEST), arrival time of taxiway queue (ATTQ), and runway service time (RST). The statistical distribution fitting test was conducted to determine the best distributions for the four key time parameters mentioned above. By putting corresponding formula of arrival rate and service time in tandem queuing basic model, the calculation formula of average waiting time, average service time and average residence time of two-level tandem queuing system were also inferred. Based on the optimization theory, this paper established a flight waiting time threshold optimization model. The optimization goal of this model is minimize the upper and lower bounds of the threshold value. And the constraint conditions of this model include wake turbulence separation and taxiway length, which setting concerned with the scale of the airport, the airport land arrangement, taxiway capacity, and number of flights and so on. The genetic algorithm was applied to solve this model. A case study showed that flight waiting time was obviously reduced after optimization.