Optimisation of aircrafts during landings - a static case

Abstract

This paper simulates an aircraft landing problem in which the total deviation cost of actual landing times from the target landing times is minimised under a wide variety of constraints. It is essentially a Mixed Integer zero-one programming where the most optimal landing time is found for a set of planes that possess realistic and predetermined time window periods and the separation times that are strictly adhered to. The programming language used is Python with an addition compiler known as NumPy that aids in mathematical models. The program was compiled in Gurobi. This paper gives a brief introduction of Air Traffic Management as a whole followed by reviewing important definitions and concepts. Previous research undertaken by several authors in the Operations Research field is studied in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 formulates the constraints in a thorough logical manner and the objective function is clearly defined. Chapter 4 implements the problem in Gurobi and important functions of Python are explained. Finally in Chapter 5, the results that have been generated is analysed briefly and several additional constraints and objective functions are discussed as well. All the programming code, results and the data sets used are all provided in the Appendix section at the end of the report.