Multi-runway aircraft sequencing at congested airports

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the airport landing problem of scheduling aircraft on multiple runways in a dynamic fashion. We attempt to modify the aircraft landing sequence from the traditionally used “First-Come-First-Served” (FCFS) order to be able to land more aircraft in a given period of time. Given a set of planes, the goal is to find a sequence such that no plane can land before it is actually available for landing, the minimum safety separation between two consecutive planes is always satisfied, and that the total landing time (makespan) is minimized. Based on the FAA partition of aircraft into weight class, our algorithm, based on previous work, provides a polynomial time feasibility condition for scheduling a set of planes in a given time interval. This algorithm for the dynamic scheduling of aircraft in a multi-runway scenario is factorial in runway number and exponential in aircraft class, both of which are fixed a priori, however it is polynomial in the number of aircraft, which is the dominating factor in the problem. It ensures that the Aircraft Sequencing Problem (ASP) presented above is not NP-Complete and allows us to develop a practical real time ATC execution policy.