Coordination of scheduling decisions in the management of airport airspace and taxiway operations

Abstract

This paper addresses the real-time problem of coordinating aircraft ground and air operations in an airport area. At a congested airport, airborne decisions are related to take-off and landing operations, while ground (taxiway) decisions consist of scheduling aircraft movements between the gates and the runways. Since the runways are the initial/terminal points of both decisions, coordinated actions have a great potential to improve the overall performance. However, in the traffic control practice the different decisions are taken by different controllers, at least in large airports. Weak coordination may result in long queues at the runways, with increasing aircraft delays and energy consumption. This paper investigates models, methods and policies for improving the coordination between taxiway scheduling and airborne scheduling. The performance of a solution is measured in terms of delay and travel time, the latter being related to the energy consumption of an aircraft. A microscopic mathematical formulation is adopted to achieve reliable solutions. Exact and heuristic methods have been analysed in combination with the different policies, based on practical-size instances from Amsterdam Schiphol airport, in the Netherlands. Computational experience shows that good quality solutions can be found within limited time, compatible with real-time operations.

Stochastic scheduling of ground movement problem integrated with taxiway routing and gate/stand allocation

“…It is thus impossible to simultaneously obtain all of results for runway and ground traffic without sacrificing large number of computational resources. Although in previous publications [32,[34][35][36] there are works claimed to co-optimize the above two problems, an interesting fact is that these works still solve the two problems at separate stages and only take the results of runway scheduling as input information for GMP.…”

Integration methods for aircraft scheduling and trajectory optimization at a busy terminal manoeuvring area

“…Mathematical models with inclusion of coordination strategies between different traffic controllers have been addressed, e.g. in D' Ariano et al (2015), Adacher et al (2018) and Samà et al (2018).…”

“…Additionally, a good quality aircraft schedule needs to be selected among those that are feasible and the resulting schedule quality depends on the relevant economic and environmental performance indicators related to different aircraft in the TMA. This is the sub-problem related to features (ii) that is named Aircraft Scheduling Problem in a Terminal Manoeuvring Area (ASP-TMA) (Bianco et al 2006;Furini et al 2015;D'Ariano et al 2015;Samà et al 2013Samà et al , 2018. In particular, we study a complex ASP-TMA problem with heterogeneous aircraft and mixed runways.…”

An Optimal Engagement Zone Avoidance Scenario in 2-D

“…Consider, for example, such applications as Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) [1][2][3] in which individual vehicles are constrained in the amount of control effort they can apply; but more interestingly, they are constrained in what physical space they can occupy at what times. The latter challenge has been approached in a variety of ways, e.g., via collision avoidance algorithms [4], interactive trajectory planning [5][6][7], or scheduling algorithms [8]. In this work, we abstract the notion of what space cannot be occupied by a particular vehicle at a particular time as a dynamic keepout zone or Engagement Zone (EZ).…”