The aircraft runway scheduling problem: A survey

Abstract

The aircraft scheduling problem consists in sequencing aircraft on airport runways and in scheduling their times of operations taking into consideration several operational constraints. It is known to be an NP-hard problem, an ongoing challenge for both researchers and air traffic controllers.The aim of this paper is to present a focused review on the most relevant techniques in the recent literature (since 2010) on the aircraft runway scheduling problem, including exact approaches such as mixed-integer programming and dynamic programming, metaheuristics, and novel approaches based on reinforcement learning. Since the benchmark instances used in the literature are easily solved by high-performance computers and current versions of solvers, we propose a new data set with challenging realistic problems constructed from real-world air traffic.

A novel mixed-integer programming approach for the aircraft landing problem

“…Some objectives may be contradictory, wherefore decision makers need to find good trade-offs Table 2. The interested reader is referred to (Lee and Balakrishnan, 2008;Bennell et al, 2011;Ikli et al, 2021a) for more details.…”

“…Since the ALP is known to be NP-hard, most of the recent works concentrate on heuristic/metaheuristic approaches, which provide high-quality results in reasonable time (Ikli et al, 2021a). However, this paper proposes an exact and highly efficient solution technique for the ALP formulated as a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP).…”

On the binary formulation of air traffic flow management problems

“…Aviation management has received great attention in the literature to enhance operations efficiency and reduce associated costs. Several management areas have been investigated, such as ground holding Andreatta et al (1993); Brunetta et al (1998); Mukherjee and Hansen (2007), gate assignment Bihr (1990); Cheng et al (2012); Ding et al (2005), runway sequencing and scheduling Bennell et al (2013); Atkin et al (2007); Ikli et al (2021); Sölveling and Clarke (2014), conflict resolution Alonso-Ayuso et al (2014); Menon et al (1999); Pallottino et al (2002); Peyronne et al (2015), airspace capacity management Barnhart et al (2012); Liu and Hu (2009); Sherali and Hill (2013), and air traffic flow management Boujarif et al (2021b). An air traffic flow management problem (ATFM) involves optimizing flight schedules to match schedules with the available airport and airspace capacities Bertsimas and Patterson (1994).…”

A 0–1 mixed‐integer program‐based group‐and‐release strategy for solving the integrated runway scheduling and taxiway routing problem

“…Balakrishnan and Chandran (2010) proposed a dynamic programming‐based algorithm by exploiting the constrained position shifting (CPS) concept, which specifies that an aircraft cannot be shifted by more than $$$ k $$$ positions (where $$$ k $$$ denotes the maximum position shifting [MPS] parameter) with respect to its nominal order in the first‐come first‐serve (FCFS) sequence. For a comprehensive literature review on the runway scheduling problem, the reader is referred to Bennell et al (2011) and Ikli et al (2021). Subsequent literature on the runway scheduling problem includes the work of Harikiopoulo and Neogi (2011), Yu et al (2011), Salehipour et al (2013), Briskorn and Stolletz (2014), Ghoniem and Sherali (2014), Vadlamani and Hosseini (2014), Faye (2015), Lieder et al (2015), Sabar and Kendall (2015), and Pohl et al (2021, 2022).…”