Scheduling Aircraft Landings—The Static Case

TLDR

Scheduling aircraft landings requires assigning each plane a landing time within a specified window while respecting separation constraints between successive landings. The paper aims to formulate and solve the aircraft landing scheduling problem for single and multiple runways. A mixed‑integer zero‑one model is developed, strengthened with additional constraints, and solved optimally via linear‑programming tree search, with an effective heuristic also proposed. Experiments on up to 50 planes and four runways demonstrate the performance of both the optimal algorithm and the heuristic.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling aircraft (plane) landings at an airport. This problem is one of deciding a landing time for each plane such that each plane lands within a predetermined time window and that separation criteria between the landing of a plane and the landing of all successive planes are respected. We present a mixed-integer zero–one formulation of the problem for the single runway case and extend it to the multiple runway case. We strengthen the linear programming relaxations of these formulations by introducing additional constraints. Throughout, we discuss how our formulations can be used to model a number of issues (choice of objective function, precedence restrictions, restricting the number of landings in a given time period, runway workload balancing) commonly encountered in practice. The problem is solved optimally using linear programming-based tree search. We also present an effective heuristic algorithm for the problem. Computational results for both the heuristic and the optimal algorithm are presented for a number of test problems involving up to 50 planes and four runways.