Yue Xiao MSc Dissertation 2015/16

Optimal scheduling of planes at an airport

Supervised by J.Winkler

Abstract

Aircraft scheduling in an airport is always a crucial issue for air traffic and a focus of operational research. The aircraft landing problem is now a bottleneck which causes delay and limits throughput of an airport and efficient landing sequences must be  acquired to import the airport performance. Therefore, to develop approaches to find the optimal sequence of aircraft landing is a meaningful research.

The aim of this research project is to develop a new algorithm for optimal scheduling aircraft landing in airports. This search develops an adaptation of the Ant-Q algorithm to solve aircraft landing problem and makes several improvements to the generic Ant-Q algorithm. Computational results show that the Ant-Q algorithm can solve the aircraft landing problem approximately well and improvements made significant increase the performance of the generic Ant-Q. This research successfully introduces a new direction of research to solve the aircraft landing problem.