Real-time scheduling of aircraft arrivals and departures in a terminal maneuvering area

The aircraft scheduling problem (ASP) is the real-time problem of scheduling takeoff and landing operations at a congested airport in a given time horizon, taking into account the runways and the air segments in the terminal maneuvering area. The ASP can be viewed as a job shop scheduling problem with additional real-world constraints. Compared with the current literature based on job shop scheduling applied to solve the ASP, we enrich the existing models by including new formulations of relevant practical constraints. We introduce and analyze three alternative ASP formulations, in which the objective function is the minimization of delay propagation with respect to the off-line timetable. Scheduling rules, heuristic and exact methods are implemented and tested on instances from the Roma Fiumicino airport, in Italy. Computational experiments show that practical-size instances are solved to near-optimality by our branch and bound algorithm in a few seconds of computation.