With increasing levels of air traf®c, making effective use of limited airport capacity is obviously important. This paper reports on an investigation undertaken by National Air Traf®c Services in the UK into improving runway utilisation at London Heathrow. This investigation centred on developing an algorithm for improving the scheduling of aircraft waiting to land. The heuristic algorithm developed (a population heuristic) is discussed and results presented using actual operational data relating to aircraft landings at London Heathrow. This data indicates that our algorithm could have improved on air traf®c control decisions in such cases by between 2±5 % in terms of reducing the timespan required to land all of the aircraft considered.

No abstract