Efficient and Equitable Departure Scheduling in Real-time: New Approaches to Old Problems

The efficient scheduling of departure runways is an important part of surface operations planning, with the goal of increasing the throughput of airports. Departure scheduling is a complex problem that needs to address the needs of diverse stakeholders including the airport operators, air traffic control and the airlines. The challenge lies in optimizing different objective functions such as maximizing departure throughput, minimizing average delay, and ensuring fairness among the airlines, while simultaneously enforcing wake-vortex separation minima, safely accommodating active runway crossings by arrival aircraft, and complying with downstream flow constraints imposed by the terminal airspace, in a dynamic and uncertain environment. This paper presents a new class of techniques based on dynamic programming that can determine, in real-time, efficient departure schedules that satisfy the various upstream and downstream constraints imposed on the departure runway system, thereby providing a valuable asset to departure management.