Heuristics and Meta-heuristics for Runway Scheduling Problems

Abstract

This chapter addresses the state-of-the-art heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches for solving aircraft runway scheduling problem under variety of settings. Runway scheduling has been one of the emerging challenges in air traffic control as the congestion figures continue to rise. From a modeling point of view, mixed-integer programming formulations for single and multiple dependent and independent runways are presented. A set partitioning reformulation of the problem is demonstrated which suggests development of a column generation scheme. From a solution methodology viewpoint, generic heuristic algorithms, optimization-based approaches, and a dynamic programming scheme within the column generation algorithm are presented. Common meta-heuristic approaches that model variant problem settings under static and dynamic environments are discussed.