The aircraft runway scheduling problem: A survey

Abstract : The aircraft scheduling problem consists in sequencing aircraft on airport runways and in scheduling their times of operations taking into consideration several operational constraints. It is known to be an NP-hard problem, an ongoing challenge for both researchers and air traffic controllers. The aim of this paper is to present a focused review on the most relevant techniques in the recent literature (since 2010) on the aircraft runway scheduling problem, including exact approaches such as mixed-integer programming and dynamic programming, metaheuristics, and novel approaches based on reinforcement learning. Since the benchmark instances used in the literature are easily solved by high-performance computers and current versions of solvers, we propose a new data set with challenging realistic problems constructed from real-world air traffic.