Optimization of Taxiway Routing and Runway Scheduling

This paper describes a mixed-integer linear programming optimization method for the coupled problems of airport taxiway routing and runway scheduling. The receding-horizon formulation and the use of iteration in the avoidance constraints allows the scalability of the baseline algorithm presented, with examples based on Heathrow Airport, London, U.K., which contains up to 240 aircraft. The results show that average taxi times can be reduced by half, compared with the first-come-first-served approach. The main advantage is shown with the departure aircraft flow. Comparative testing demonstrates that iteration reduces the computational demand of the required separation constraints while introducing no loss in performance.