Runway Scheduling for Charlotte Douglas International Airport

This paper explores a multiple runway scheduling problem and generates the schedule for arrivals, departures and crossing aircraft planning to use the runways within a given planning horizon. We present a mixed integer linear programming-based model that explicitly considers separation criteria between pairs of aircraft and also incorporates various Traffic Management Initiatives. It also includes constraints that arise due to airport layout. Additionally, we introduce an idea of selective Constrained Position Shifting (CPS), which limits the range of position an aircraft can hold in the runway schedule among a subset of flights. Constraints are included in the model to limit the relative sequence of the subset of departures under CPS. In 2014, this model was used in the NASA’s Spot and Runway Departure Advisor human-in-the-loop simulations for Charlotte Douglas International Airport. In this paper, the presented model was tested in moderate and heavy surface traffic scenarios in a simulated environment, and results indicate an average improvement of 30% in cumulative delay over first-come-first-served.