An ant colony algorithm for an aircraft sequencing problem in the airport terminal area

An aircraft sequencing problem(ASP) is a non-deterministic polynomial hard(NP-hard) problem,which is hard to resolve.The ASP was treated as a particular job-shop scheduling problem(JSP),and an ant colony algorithm(ACA) for the ASP was designed with the objective of minimizing the makespan of landing airplanes.The orthogonal test was employed to study the optimal parameters of the ACA for the ASP.The efficiency and reliability of the ACA for the ASP was investigated by comparing the sequencing results of FCFS method for different numbers of landing aircraft.The ACA for the ASP is proved to be better than FCFS,which can decrease the makespan of landing airplanes by 14%.The ACA of the ASP can obtain a satisfactory solution with shorter CPU time,which can provide support for real-time automatic air traffic management.