Airport surface movement scheduling with route assignment using first-come first-served approach

This paper describes a first-come first-served scheduler that is being developed for integrated departure and arrival management at airports. Previous first-come first-served scheduler developed for Traffic Flow Management research was enhanced to handle directionality constraints at taxiway links as well as crossing constraints at taxiway junctions. Instead of using predetermined taxi routes, a route assignment function is added. For the given flight, the scheduler finds upto five taxi routes. Scheduling is performed for each route, and the route and schedule that result in the minimum delay for the given flight is selected. The scheduler was tested with a historic surface traffic at Incheon International Airport on April 1st, 2015 that contains about 800 flights in 24 hour period. Two different prioritization strategies were compared. When the priority was based solely on the scheduled departure or arrival times, the average delay was 6.3 minutes. If priority was given to arrival flights, average delay for arrival flights was 1.3 minutes while that of departure flight was increased to 13.4 minutes. It was also discovered that taxiway crossing constraints have little impact on the delays.