The trade-off between taxi time and fuel consumption in airport ground movement

Abstract

Environmental issues play an important role across many sectors. This is particularly the case in the air transportation industry. One area which has remained relatively unexplored in this context is the ground movement problem for aircraft on the airport’s surface. Aircraft have to be routed from a gate to a runway and vice versa and a key area of study is whether fuel burn and environmental impact improvements will best result from purely minimising the taxi times or whether it is also important to avoid multiple acceleration phases. This paper presents a newly developed multi-objective approach for analysing the trade-off between taxi time and fuel consumption during taxiing. The approach consists of a combination of a graph-based routing algorithm and a population adaptive immune algorithm to discover different speed profiles of aircraft. Analysis with data from a European hub airport has highlighted the impressive performance of the new approach. Furthermore, it is shown that the trade-off between taxi time and fuel consumption is very sensitive to the fuel-related objective function which is used.