Ant colony system based on receding horizon control for aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling

The aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling (ASS) problem is one of the most significant problems in the air traffic control (ATC). This paper makes the first attempt to design an ant colony system (ACS) based approach to solve this NP-hard problem. In order to reduce the computational effort of the optimization process, the receding horizon control (RHC) strategy is integrated into the ACS to divide the optimization process into several sub-processes and solve them one by one. This strategy can reduce the problem scale in each sub-optimization process, resulting in lighter computational effort and higher quality solution for the whole problem. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed RHC based ACS algorithm for the ASS problem (RHC-ACS-ASS). Simulation results show that the RHC-ACS-ASS not only outperforms the GA based approaches, but also the ACS based approach without using the RHC strategy.