A systems approach for scheduling aircraft landings in JFK airport

Abstract

The aircraft landings scheduling problem at an airport has become very challenging due to the increase of air traffic. Traditionally, this problem has been widely studied by formulating it as an optimization model solved by various operation research approaches. However, these approaches are not able to capture the dynamic nature of the aircraft landing scheduling problem appropriately and handle uncertainty easily. A systems approach provides an alternative to solve such a problem from a systematic perspective. In this regard, the concept of general systems problem solving (GSPS) was first introduced in 1970s, and yet the power of the GSPS methodology is not fully discovered as it had only been applied to few domains. In this paper, a new general systems problem solving framework integrating computational intelligence techniques (GSPS-CI) is introduced. The two main functions of the framework are: (1) adaptive network based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) to predict flight delays, and (2) fuzzy decision making procedure to schedule aircraft landings. The effectiveness of the GSPS-CI framework is tested on the JFK airport in USA, one of the most complex real-life systems.