Stochastic terminal flight arrival and departure scheduling problem under performance-based navigation environment

Abstract

Flight arrival and departure scheduling (FAADS) problem, one of the critical tasks in terminal air traffic operation, faces new challenges as the terminal air traffic management has transformed to adapt to the performance-based navigation (PBN) environment; beside of that, the terminal system uncertainties which are usually due to the time-varying interference of the convective weather and flight arrival time will also exacerbate the difficulty to realize an efficient terminal air traffic operation. In order to effectively address the above issues, we propose the formulation and solution approach for a stochastic terminal FAADS problem under PBN environment. The proposed FAADS problem formulation combines the flexible 4-dimensional trajectory requirement under PBN environment and the stochastic quantifications both from the convective weather and flight arrival time uncertainties, which can finally make the FAADS results realize the avoidance of the convective weather and immunity of the flight arrival time variations within tolerable risk probabilities. We provide an efficient solution approach to tackle this problem with complex mixed integer and nonlinear programming basics and illustrate the capabilities of the solution approach by a test case on real terminal system in Shanghai Metroplex. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed problem formulation and solution approach.