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Sequence searching and evaluation: a unified approach for aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling problems

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Abstract

Arrival sequencing and scheduling (ASS) is an important part of air traffic control. In the literature, various formulations of the ASS problems have been established by taking different scheduling requirements into account, and various methods have been developed to cope with these ASS problems. However, it is usually uneasy to generalize a method designed for one ASS formulation to another, while an approach that is able to handle different ASS problems is of great significance since air traffic controllers may need to switch among different scheduling requirements in practice. Motivated by this observation, an approach that is applicable to a number of different problem formulations of ASS is proposed in this paper. Specifically, the ASS problems that include different objective functions and constraints are firstly abstracted as a constrained permutation-based problem. After that, a Sequence Searching and Evaluation (SSE) approach is developed for the constrained permutation-based problem. The SSE solves different ASS problems by separating the sequence searching in one stage using an Estimation of Distribution Algorithm framework, and evaluating sequences in the second stage. Experiment results show that SSE is capable of obtaining competitive solutions for a variety of ASS problems.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No.2011CB707000), the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (Grant No. 61425014) and the Foundation for Innovative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61221061).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, People’s Republic of China

    Xiao-Peng Ji & Xian-Bin Cao

  2. School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, People’s Republic of China

    Ke Tang

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  1. Xiao-Peng Ji
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  2. Xian-Bin Cao
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Correspondence to Xian-Bin Cao.

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Ji, XP., Cao, XB. & Tang, K. Sequence searching and evaluation: a unified approach for aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling problems. Memetic Comp. 8, 109–123 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12293-015-0172-z

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