Aircraft landing planning under uncertain conditions

Abstract

Aircraft Landing Planning is challenging because the inherently limited capacity of airport runways causes bottlenecks. This type of planning involves different stakeholders (e.g., airlines, air traffic services providers, airport authorities, and passengers) and faces various uncertainties (e.g., take-off time variability, or wind speeds). This study, conducted in collaboration with the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation (EUROCONTROL), proposes a mathematical formulation of the problem and a simulation framework that accounts for uncertainties. We also propose different solution methods: a descent and a tabu search, as well as a mechanism for guiding restarts, to diversify the search process. These methods provide, in our simulated environment, more effective and stable solutions than the popular first-come-first-served practice regarding three objective functions (namely, delay, fuel, and landing sequence stability), which are considered lexicographically. Indeed, the average delays and fuel costs are reduced by 50% and 10%, respectively, at the cost of a small number of landing-sequence modifications, as each flight is repositioned an average of 0.5 times. Moreover, the computations can be performed quickly, which is crucial because re-optimization needs to be done online when flight information is updated.

Two-stage stochastic programming models for the extended aircraft arrival management problem with multiple pre-scheduling points

“…An even more realistic study would take into account not only uncertainty but also the dynamic nature of the operational problem: continuously, new aircraft enter, while other aircraft leave the optimization horizon. Very recently, a few works tackled the problem of aircraft scheduling and sequencing in the dynamic context, taking into account uncertainty (Huo et al, 2021;Vié et al, 2022). Perspectives of the current work include extending the two-stage stochastic programming formulation to the dynamic case.…”

Air-traffic controller and autopilot joint control of aircraft as mixed integer quadratic problem

“…This problem has been studied in various mathematical formulations since the late 1970s. To date, a variety of formulations have been proposed, representing different sets of requirements of pilots and air traffic controllers (ATC) to the resulting flow (see, for example, [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] and references within).…”

Cascade aircraft flows merging with multiple order changes

“…Papers [6,7,8,9,10,11] and references within present reviews of possible ways of setting and solving the problem of merging aircraft flows for the past 10 years.…”