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An evolutionary approach for dynamic single-runway arrival sequencing and scheduling problem

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Abstract

Aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling is a classic problem in the air traffic control to ensure safety and order of the operations at the terminal area. Most of the related studies have formulated this problem as a static case and assume the information of all the flights is known in advance. However, the operation of the terminal area is actually a dynamic incremental process. Various kinds of uncertainties may exist during this process, which will make the scheduling decision obtained in the static environment inappropriate. In this paper, aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling problem is tackled in the form of a dynamic optimization problem. An evolutionary approach, namely dynamic sequence searching and evaluation, is proposed. The proposed approach employs an estimation of distribution algorithm and a heuristic search method to seek the optimal landing sequence of flights. Compared with other related algorithms, the proposed method performs much better on several test instances including an instance obtained from the real data of the Beijing Capital International Airport.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of China (Grant No. 61425014), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 91538204), and the Foundation for Innovative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61521091).

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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 & Wen-Bo Du

  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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  3. Wen-Bo Du
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  4. Ke Tang
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Correspondence to Xian-Bin Cao.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Communicated by V. Loia.

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Ji, XP., Cao, XB., Du, WB. et al. An evolutionary approach for dynamic single-runway arrival sequencing and scheduling problem. Soft Comput 21, 7021–7037 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-016-2241-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-016-2241-8

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