Incorporating Active Runway Crossings in Airport Departure Scheduling

A mixed integer linear program is presented for deterministically scheduling departure and arrival aircraft at airport runways. This method addresses different schemes of managing the departure queuing area by treating it as first-in-first-out queues or as a simple parking area where any available aircraft can take-off irrespective of its relative sequence with others. In addition, this method explicitly considers separation criteria between successive aircraft and also incorporates an optional prioritization scheme using time windows. Multiple objectives pertaining to throughput and system delay are used independently. Results indicate improvement over a basic first-come-first-serve rule in both system delay and throughput. Minimizing system delay results in small deviations from optimal throughput, whereas minimizing throughput results in large deviations in system delay. Enhancements for computational efficiency are also presented in the form of reformulating certain constraints and defining additional inequalities for better bounds.