Methods And Sources For Underpinning Airport Ground Movement Decision Support Systems

Abstract

The airport Ground Movement problem is concerned with the allo- cation of routes to aircraft for their travel along taxiways between the runway and the stands. It is important to find high quality solutions to this problem because it has a strong influence on the capacity of an airport and upon the environmental impact. The problem is particularly challenging. It has multiple objectives (such as minimising taxi time and fuel consumption). It also has considerable uncertainty, which arises from the complex operations of an airport. It is an active and topical area of research. A barrier to scientific research in this area is the lack of publicly available realistic data and benchmark problems. The reason for this is often concerned with commercial sensitivities. We have worked with airports and service providers to address this issue, by exploring several sources of freely-available data and developing algorithms for cleaning and processing the data into a more suitable form. The result is a system to generate datasets that are realistic, and that facilitate research with the potential to improve on real-world problems, without the confidentiality and commercial licensing issues usually associated with real airport data. Case studies with several international airports demonstrate the usefulness of the datasets. The algorithms have been implemented within three tools and made freely-available for researchers. A benchmark Ground Movement problem has also been made available, with results for an existing Ground Movement algorithm. It is intended that these contributions will underpin the advance of research in this difficult application area.