Efficient Aircraft Arrival Sequencing Given Airport Gate Assignment

The aircraft sequencing problem has been well discussed in many variants over the years; and during this time, the problem has changed from a standalone optimization problem to an embedded problem. At hub airports, aircraft sequencing influences passengers’ available connecting times. Short connections could benefit from a modification of the arrival or departure sequence. In our work, we have developed a bilevel optimization problem that combines the aircraft sequencing problem and the airport gate assignment problem at hub airports to make connections more efficient. The decision on the gate assignments is made at the upper level, whereas the efficient aircraft arrival sequencing is addressed at the lower level. Methods for solving this kind of large-scale bilevel optimization problem by considering a full day of operation and dynamically changing traffic situations have yet to be researched. In this paper, we focus on efficient aircraft sequencing by taking into consideration gate assignments, and we propose a multiobjective mixed integer linear program that is solved by an interactive method and considers the (contradicting) objectives of competing airlines and the air traffic control. The capabilities of our approach are demonstrated by modeling and solving a real-case scenario for Munich Airport.