Airport configuration planning with uncertain weather and noise abatement procedures

This paper develops a runway resource allocation model that is suitable for airport strategical planning. The model optimizes the selection of landing and takeoff runways and allocates capacity according to air traffic demand by minimizing delay and noise costs. The multi-objective optimization model is subject to a number of constraints, related to operational procedures, runway configuration capacity, safety, and weather conditions. Because weather accuracy is far from the accuracy requirements to make a deterministic perfect decision at the right time, we provide a method to quantify weather forecast accuracy. By using the probability density function of forecast errors, we derive formulations to calculate the probability that a runway configuration satisfies safety constraints given the predicted wind, ceiling, and visibility. Therefore, the optimization model will generate a best solution in the sense of probability.