Flexible Combined Arrival–Departure Aircraft Scheduling

Establishing a well-planned schedule for departing and arriving aircraft is essential for satisfying the increasing demand for runway traffic, as well as ensuring the balance of runway capacity and demand. However, the existing optimal scheduling methods for departing and arriving aircraft may enhance use efficiency in the runway system for the precontrol phase of tactical planning. It may not be applicable for the flexible runway traffic configurations and the operation mode; in concrete terms, every time the runway operation mode varies, significant adaptations are mandatory to be made to the conventional model. On the other hand, the taxi-out time cost is not considered in the objective function for traditional methods, which usually leads to more taxi time. In this paper, we attempt to address the above challenges; more specifically, we propose a generalized scheduler for the combined arrival–departure scheduling for different runway operation modes in the form of a mixed integer linear program. By means of adjusting parameters, our scheduler can adapt to a wide range of operational scenarios. Meanwhile, the innovative wake separation constraints are more flexible with different aircraft types and operation modes and are linear with the decision variables. Furthermore, we have substantiated the validity of the proposed scheduler through theoretical analysis and experimental measurements.