Computing Optimal Schedules For Landing Aircraft

Publication
Abela, J., Abramson, D., Krishnamoorthy, M. De Silva, A and Mills, G. "Computing Optimal Schedules for Landing Aircraft", The 12th National Conference of the Australian Society for Operations Research. Adelaide, July 7-9, 1993, pp 71 - 90
Abstract
In this paper we describe two approaches for solving the problem of scheduling aircraft landing times. In this problem, the air traffic controller must compute a landing time for each aircraft in the horizon, and must attempt to minimise costs whilst observing a number of hard constraints. The costs are associated with aircraft landing times varying from the preferred landing time. The hard constraints are concerned with preventing aircraft from landing within a prescribed minimum time of each other. Given a certain number of aircraft within the air traffic controllers' horizon at a certain point in time, we develop a heuristic for the problem using a genetic algorithm (GA). We also formulate this problem as a mixed integer problem (MIP) and develop a branch and bound algorithm for its solution. We compare the quality of the two solutions obtained through computational tests performed on a wide range of problems.
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