Optimal mixed-mode runway scheduling — Mixed-integer programming for ATC scheduling

Abstract

On mixed-mode runways arriving and departing aircraft share the same runway. Whereas arriving aircraft have rather tight constraints with respect to their touch down time departing aircraft can wait on-ground. Sufficiently large gaps have to be generated in between two different aircraft. We therefore have to schedule arriving and departing aircraft in an integrated fashion taking a diverse set of requirements, e.g., minimum separation, tight touch down windows, etc. into account. We present an integrated approach to mixed-mode runway scheduling using mixed-integer programming techniques. These techniques for solving optimization problems provides us with a quality guarantee of the computed solution as well as flexibility to incorporate additional constraints and in particular to use non-monotone objective functions. The resulting mixed-integer program can be solved fast using modern solvers. We also provide a brief comparison to other approaches using a real-world simulation and highlight advantages and disadvantages of our approach.