Improved coordination of scheduling decisions in the management of airport airspace and taxiway operations

This talk addresses the real-time problem of coordinating aircraft ground and air operations in a terminal control area. At congested airports, airborne decisions are related to take-off and landing operations, while ground (taxiway) decisions consist of scheduling aircraft movements between gate areas and runways. Since runways are the initial/terminal points of both decisions, coordinated actions have a great potential to improve the overall system performance. However, in traffic control practice the different decisions are taken by different controllers, at least in large airports. Weak coordination may result in long queues at runways, while increasing aircraft delays and energy consumption. This talk investigates models, methods and policies for improving the coordination between taxiway and airborne scheduling. The flexibility and potential of alternative graph-based models are discussed with consideration of air traffic rules and objectives. Advanced aircraft scheduling and routing methods are introduced to achieve reliable solutions. The system performance is measured in terms of aircraft delay and travel time, the latter being related to the energy consumption.  Exact and heuristic methods are analysed in combination with different traffic management policies, based on practical-size Amsterdam Schiphol airport instances (in the Netherlands). Our computational results show that near-optimal solutions can be found within a limited time for real-time operations.