Multi-Domain Semantic Model and Real-Time Planning Approach to Safe and Efficient Airport Taxiway Operations

Airport taxiway operations refer to the safe and efficient movement of aircraft while they are on the ground. It is now evident that as aviation systems become progressively crowded, mitigation of unnecessary congestion, accidents and costly delays will require new approaches to the scheduling and control of airport taxiway operations. This paper proposes a combined semantic model and reasoning, and real-time planning approach to decision making for safe and efficient airport taxiway operations. A key challenge in this work is finding ways to coordinate the real-time planning with the semantic model knowledge and reasoning capability to produce a system that has good performance, and can dynamically adapt to unexpected events. We exercise the proposed methodology on a planning problem that requires the coordination of multiple planes as they move from the terminal building to the same departure runway.