A heuristic approach to greener airport ground movement

Ever increasing air traffic, rising costs and tighter environmental targets create a pressure for efficient airport ground movement. Ground movement links other airport operations such as departure sequencing, arrival sequencing and gate/stand allocation and its operation can affect each of these. Previously, reducing taxi time was considered the main objective of the ground movement problem. However, this may conflict with efforts of airlines to minimise their fuel consumption as shorter taxi time may require higher speed and acceleration during taxiing. Therefore, in this paper a multi-objective multi-component optimisation problem is formulated which combines two components: scheduling and routing of aircraft and speed profile optimisation. To solve this problem an integrated solution method is adopted to more accurately investigate the trade-off between the total taxi time and fuel consumption. The new heuristic which is proposed here uses observations about the characteristics of the optimised speed profiles in order to greatly improve the speed of the graph-based routing and scheduling algorithm. Current results, using real airport data, confirm that this approach can find better solutions faster, making it very promising for application within on-line applications.