An online method for the real-time aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling problem

Aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling (ASS) is a hot topic in air traffic control, which has been proven to be an NP-hard problem. So far, many efforts have been made by modeling this problem in a static case, in which the information of all the landing aircrafts is known in advance. However, the air traffic environment in the airport is dynamic. As new aircrafts are arriving at the airport continually, the corresponding adjustment should be considered for the scheduling. From this point of view, an online method which is based on estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) is introduced in this paper. At any moment in the sequencing operation, the method only focuses on those aircrafts which have already arrived at the airport but have not been assigned to land. Experiments show that the proposed method is effective and efficient to achieve a better result in solving the real-time ASS.