Hybrid Algorithms for the Multiple Runway Aircraft Landing Problem

Over the past few decades, air traffic has experienced a tremendous Growth. However, as the air traffic develops, the limitation of the runway becomes the bottleneck during the airport operation and scheduling aircraft landing present a complex daily task encountered by most air traffic control towers. In this paper, we study the Multiple Runway case of the Aircraft Landing Problem (MRALP), which is a heavily studied combinatorial optimization problem. Many approaches such as linear programming, Genetic Algorithm (GA) and local search have been applied to the MRALP. This paper describes four hybrid algorithms for solving ALP problems. The algorithm uses two computational heuristic search techniques, namely, Tabu Search (TS) and GA. Despite the combinatorial complexity of ALP problems, the hybrid algorithms find best solutions very quickly and with very high frequencies.