Optimization Architecture for Airport Surface Operations

This paper first discusses the problem of optimizing airport surface operations, points out salient features of the problem that are common to all airports, and proposes an optimization strategy. It then examines a wide range of possible specific features peculiar to only some airports and the resulting controller tasks and possible decision support functions, and discusses the consequent complexities of the optimization problems. After discussing the challenging nature of the optimization problem, we propose an optimization strategy and an optimization architecture to deal with the challenges.