Airport surface trajectory optimization considering runway exit selection

The efficiency of taxiing process has become an important factor that restricts the full use of airport runway capacity. This paper investigates the taxiway planning problem. Different from existing related literatures which do not consider the runway exit selecting problem, the significance of runway exit selection for landing aircrafts is discussed. We propose a new conception, Runway Exit Availability (REA), to measure the probability that a flight clear the runway from a specific exit. Applying with REA, we can assign a proper exit to each landing flight. Besides, we construct a time-space network for the airport taxiing system. A mixed integer programming model based on this network is proposed for the assignment of 4D taxiing trajectories - routes and times. With taxiway operations of Beijing Capital International Airport as the testing background, experimental analysis shows that, the scheduling result by considering runway exit selection is superior to the result when exit selection is not considered and the calculation time of the scheduling process is acceptable for application in real systems.