Integrated Optimization of Airport Taxiway and Runway Scheduling

Capacity limitation of runway and taxiway in an airport is often the major limiting factor of air traffic operation. The congestions on the apron of an airport cause severe delay on aircraft schedule. This paper proposes an integrated algorithm to solve problems of runway scheduling and taxiway routing simultaneously for both departure and arrival aircrafts. A set partitioning model with side constraint is proposed in which each possible aircraft route in the taxiway and runway is regarded as a decision variable. Beside traditional set partitioning constraints, two types of constraints are proposed to maintain a minimum separation distance between aircrafts in the taxiway and runway. The preliminary results show that our integrated algorithm outperforms the sequential method.