Receding Horizon, Iterative Optimization of Taxiway Routing and Runway Scheduling

Abstract

This paper extends previous work on a coupled optimization method for air- port taxiway routing and runway scheduling. An iterative method is used to reduce the computational demand of the required separation constraints whilst introducing no loss in performance. A Receding Horizon (RH) approach is added to further reduce the solution times. As well as faster solve times, RH enables the computation to be spread between horizons preventing detailed plans being calculated for the distant future. RH is an ap- proximation to the globally optimal solution, but still shown to improve upon a First Come First Serve (FCFS) approach, by 56% when comparing the total taxi time and 9% when comparing runway throughput.