A memetic algorithm to solve the dynamic multiple runway aircraft landing problem

Abstract

The aircraft landing problem (ALP) consists of scheduling the landing of aircrafts onto the available runways in an airport by assigning to each aircraft a landing time and a specific runway while respecting different operational constraints. This is a complex task for the air traffic controller, especially when the flow of aircrafts entering the radar range is continuous and the number of aircrafts is unknown a priori. In this paper, we study the dynamic version of the ALP when new aircrafts appear over time, which means that the landing of the previous aircrafts should be rescheduled. To solve this problem, we propose a memetic algorithm combining an ant colony algorithm and a local heuristic.

Keywords

• Dynamic aircraft landing problem
• Ant colony optimization
• Local search
• Metaheuristics