Routing and Scheduling Movements at Airports Considering Interdependence and Intermediate Holding

Balancing the trade-off between increasing demand of airport capacity and tighter environmental regulations has been recognised by the European Commission as one of the grand challenges.

To better utilise the existing airport infrastructure and reduce pollution, future aerodrome traffic management systems, incorporating Trajectory-Based Taxi Operations (TBTO), are of great importance.

Aligned with the European A-SMGCS and US NextGen, future aerodrome operations based on TBTO will coordinate aircraft movements (manned/unmanned) to specific locations on the airport surface at specific times, leading to time/fuel/cost saving and increased safety.

Regarding TBTO the decision on which aircraft to solve first and where to hold the aircraft and for how long affects possible solutions of the remaining aircraft and availability of scarce resources such as runways and gates.

Therefore, it is paramount/timely to further develop such a framework to incorporate constraints from other airside operations, enable intermediate holding, and understand interdependencies between aircraft.