Airport Ground Movement

Abstract

Worldwide air traffic tends to increase and for many airports it is no longer an option to expand terminals and runways, so airports are trying to maximize their operational efficiency. Many airports already operate near their maximal capacity. Peak hours imply operational bottlenecks and cause chained delays across flights impacting passengers, airlines and airports. Therefore there is a need for the optimization of the ground movements at the airports. The ground movement problem consists of routing the departing planes from the gate to the runway for takeoff, and the arriving planes from the runway to the gate, and to schedule their movements. The main goal is to minimize the time spent by the planes during their ground movements while respecting all the rules established by the Advanced Surface Movement, Guidance and Control Systems of the International Civil Aviation. Each aircraft event (arrival or departing authorization) generates a new environment and therefore a new instance of the Ground Movement Problem. The optimization approach proposed is based on an Iterated Local Search and provides a fast heuristic solution for each real-time event generated instance granting all safety regulations. Preliminary computational results are reported for real data comparing the heuristic solutions with the solutions obtained using a mixed-integer programming approach.