Optimal Selection of Airport Runway Configurations

We present a mixed integer programming (MIP) model to solve the problems of (i) selecting an airport’s optimal sequence of runway configurations and (ii) determining the optimal balance of arrivals and departures to be served at any moment. These problems, the runway configuration management (RCM) problem and the arrival/departure runway balancing (ADRB) problem, respectively, are of critical importance in minimizing the delay of both in-flight and on-the-ground aircraft along with their associated costs. We show that under mild assumptions on the time required to change between configurations, large realistic problem instances can be solved within several seconds. Furthermore, as assumptions are relaxed, optimal solutions are still found within several minutes. Comparison with a sophisticated baseline heuristic reveals that in many cases the potential reduction in cost from using the method is significant and could be expected to be of the order of at least 10%. Finally, we present an extension of the MIP model to solve these two problems for a group of airports in a metropolitan area such as New York (metroplex), where operations at each airport within the metroplex might have an impact on operations at some of the other airports due to limitations in shared airspace.