Heuristics for Flights Arrival Scheduling at Airports

Abstract

We develop an efficient matheuristic algorithm for the Aircraft Landing Problem (ALP). The ALP aims to schedule aircraft landings such that the total deviation from target arrival times is minimized. We propose a Relax-and-Solve (R&S) algorithm that operates by performing a set of "relax" and "solve" iterations. The relax iteration destructs a solution, and the solve iteration re-constructs an improved solution. We compare the proposed algorithm with the state-of-the-art algorithms for the ALP, and show that it is able to obtain almost all best known solutions within one minute, even for instances including 500 aircraft. Those characteristics of the algorithm are very important for practical settings, particularly, the typical short time window available for planning the aircraft landings at busy airports demands for quick delivery of quality landing schedules (or updating the current schedule), and fast and effective algorithms are therefore paramount.

Keywords: OR in airlines, weighted earliness and tardiness minimization, heuristic, relaxation neighborhood, Relax-and-Solve