A modified variable neighborhood search for aircraft landing problem

Abstract

Aircraft landing problem is a crucial operation in air traffic flow management. Appropriate and efficient landing sequencing, runway assignment and scheduled landing time are of great importance to maintain flight safety and minimize the overall tardiness of all flights. The heuristic approaches mainly focus on providing a fast and feasible solution in a reasonable amount of time. The proposed modified variable neighbor search heuristic shows its robustness in searching the optimal result. The computational study for analyzing the algorithm indicates the effectiveness in handling time sensitive aircraft landing model. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed in comparison with the result from the literature and it is capable of accommodating the perturbation strengthen iteratively to escape from the local optimum trap and reduce the computational burden in branch-and-bound algorithm using CPLEX optimizer.