Revisit the fairness issues in flight landing scheduling

Flight landing optimization at the terminal area is an ongoing challenge for air traffic controllers. The current schedule scheme is first-come-first-served (FCFS). There are studies focusing on how to minimize the total cost or maximize the throughput. These schemes are short of fairness consideration. In this paper, we start from a real recent example to show that a lack of consideration of long-term fairness may cause significant problems in certain emergency situations. We propose new definitions of fairness between different airlines which consider the history fairness information. We then study the fairness in flight landing problem (FFLP). We show that the problem is NP-hard to solve. Therefore, we develop a fast heuristic. Our experiment results show that our algorithm achieves a 50.4% gain on long-term fairness.