Scheduling Aircraft Landings - The Dynamic Case

Erling Veidal

AbstractThis Master Theses is about solving the aircraft landing problem dynamically. Given an original landing schedule for the incoming aircraft this schedule are rescheduled whenever an aircraft arrives at the inflight for the runway early or late compared to the original scheduled landing time. Three different approaches for dealing with early aircraft and four different solutions dealing with late aircraft are presented, implemented and tested. For rescheduling a part of the original schedule a population heuristic is created. Based on the results, the best approach for early aircraft is to deal with these as late aircraft and hence recalculate a part of the original schedule and insert the early aircraft as soon as possible. The different late approaches all gave the same results which was not expected, this is probarbly due to the fact that the time window for all the aircraft are so tight that the heursitics allways finds the same solution. The apperance time is the key factor in the rescheduling and will dictate the solution. When comparing the results to a FCFS (First-Come-First-Served) scheme that calculates the landing time according to the apperance time of the aircraft and takes the seperation constraints into account, the different approaches tested finds the same solution as the FCFS scheme. The different dynamic approaches have been tested on files containing from 10 to 100 aircraft.
TypeMaster's thesis [Academic thesis]
Year2007
PublisherInformatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, DTU
AddressRichard Petersens Plads, Building 321, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
SeriesIMM-Thesis-2007-34
NoteSupervised by Professor Jens Clausen, IMM, DTU.
Electronic version(s)[pdf]
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Operations Research