Uncertainty-Aware Flight Scheduling for Airport Throughput and Flight Delay Optimization

Abstract

The continuous growth in the demand for air transportation exceeds the capacity of existing infrastructure, usually leading to unreliable flight schedules, i.e., long flight delays and uncertainties in arrival/departure and taxi times. We tackle the problem in this paper by designing an air traffic control algorithm, which can accommodate both airport throughput and flight quality of service in terms of flight delay on a given runway. The flight scheduling problem is formulated as an integer linear programming, and then converted to a multiobjective optimization problem which enables the computation of tradeoff between scheduling resolution and time complexity. Based on the multiobjective optimization, a heuristic algorithm considering uncertainties in flight arrival/departure time and taxi time is designed to achieve an improvement in airport throughput and a reduction in flight delay. Extensive simulations show that compared to benchmarking schemes, the proposed uncertainty-aware flight scheduling algorithm can improve the airport throughput and flight delay by up to 12.02% and 31.4%, respectively.