Generation of Optimized Routes and Schedules for Surface Movement of Aircraft on Taxiways

Due to growing congestion at major airports, many conflicts occur during the motion of aircraft on taxiways, leading to delays. This study aims to devise a strategy to arrive at optimized routes and schedules for surface movement of aircraft on taxiways, which can facilitate the airport surface movement controllers in optimal sequencing of arrivals and departures at a busy airport. Shortest routes for operation on a network of runways and taxiways are obtained using Dijkstra’s algorithm. A modified Time Dependent Shortest Route algorithm using mixed-integer programming is used for generating conflict free trajectories with minimum total overall delay for a group of aircraft operating on predetermined routes, in a given time window. The algorithm was run for a hypothetical test case on CSIA, Mumbai to illustrate its efficacy.