Optimization of departure runway scheduling incorporating arrival crossings

The runway is a key airport resource and an efficient runway operation is critical to enhance the airport efficiency and to reduce delays. This paper addresses the problem of scheduling aircraft departures incorporating arrival crossings. Constraints for wake turbulence separations, flight time window restrictions, and holding queue capacity at runway threshold are explicitly considered. We present two integer linear programming models and a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. Comparison tests are conducted for the south side of Paris Charles De Gaulle Airport and show that the three proposed methods can significantly improve the solutions based on the simple first‐come‐first‐served rule. Moreover, SA has sufficiently small computation time for real‐time deployment.