Departure-Arrival Aircraft Scheduling on Runways Considering a Number of Parking Spaces

This study considers a scheduling problem of combined arrival-departure aircrafts over multiple runways with a number of a parking spaces constraint that minimizes the total weighted tardiness. This phenomenon is modelled as a parallel machine scheduling problem with unequal ready time, target time and dead line. Additionally, sequence-dependent separation times on each runway are considered to prevent the dangers associated with wake vortex effects. Considering occasional occurrence of such restrictions at airports as well as planning a better deal with such issues, a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model is presented and solved by Lingo software to show its validity. A meta-heuristic algorithm, namely firefly algorithm (FA), is proposed to achieve acceptable results in a reasonable time.The performance of the proposed FA is evaluated through a comprehensive benchmark of instances. Furthermore, the computational results show that the performance of the proposed FA is satisfactory in terms of computational time compared with Lingo. Finally, the conclusion is provided.