An Efficient Approximation Algorithm for Aircraft Arrival Sequencing and Scheduling Problem

The aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling (ASS) problem is a salient problem in airports′ runway scheduling system, which proves to be nondeterministic polynomial (NP) hard. This paper formulates the ASS in the form of a constrained permutation problem and designs a new approximation algorithm to solve it. Then the numerical study is conducted, which validates that this new algorithm has much better performance than ant colony (AC) algorithm and CPLEX, especially when the aircraft types are not too many. In the end, some conclusions are summarized.