The trade-off between taxi time and fuel consumption in airport ground movement

Environmental impact is a very important agenda item in many sectors nowadays, which the air transportation sector is also trying to reduce as much as possible. One area which has remained relatively unexplored in this context is the ground movement problem for aircraft on the airport’s surface. Aircraft have to be routed from a gate to a runway and vice versa and it is still unknown whether fuel burn and environmental impact reductions will best result from purely minimising the taxi times or whether it is also important to avoid multiple acceleration phases. This paper presents a newly developed multi-objective approach for analysing the trade-off between taxi time and fuel consumption during taxiing. The approach consists of a combination of a graph-based routing algorithm and a population adaptive immune algorithm to discover different speed profiles of aircraft. Analysis with data from a European hub airport has highlighted the impressive performance of the new approach. Furthermore, it is shown that the trade-off between taxi time and fuel consumption is very sensitive to the fuel-related objective function which is used

A more realistic approach for airport ground movement optimisation with stand holding

In addition to having to handle constantly increasing numbers of aircraft, modern airports also have to address a wide range of environmental regulations and requirements. As airports work closer and closer to their maximal possible capacity, the operations problems that need to be solved become more and more complex. This increasing level of complexity leads to a situation where the introduction of advanced decision support systems becomes more and more attractive. Such systems have the potential to improve efficient airside operations and to mitigate against the environmental impact of those operations. This paper addresses the problem of moving aircraft from one location within an airport to another as efficiently as possible in terms of time and fuel spent. The problem is often called the ground movement problem and the movements are usually from gate/stands to a runway or vice-versa. We introduce a new sequential graph based algorithm to address this problem. This approach has several advantages over previous approaches. It increases the realism of the modelling and it draws upon a recent methodology to more accurately estimate taxi times. The algorithm aims to absorb as much waiting time for delay as possible at the stand (with engines off) rather than out on the taxiways (with engines running). The impact of successfully achieving this aim is to reduce the environmental pollution. This approach has been tested using data from a European hub airport and it has demonstrated very promising results. We compare the performance of the algorithm against a lower bound on the taxi time and the limits to the amount of waiting time that can be absorbed at stand