Spring 2008 Seminar Series

DATE: February 21, 2008
LOCATION: E40-298
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the ORC ConferenceRoom, E40-106

SPEAKER:
Hamsa Balakrishnan

TITLE
Scheduling Takeoffs and Landings at Airports: New Approaches to Old Problems

ABSTRACT
The efficient scheduling of takeoffs and landings on runways is an important part of airport operations planning, with the goal of increasing the throughput of airports. Runway scheduling is a complex problem that needs to address the needs of diverse stakeholders including the airport operators, air traffic control and the airlines. The challenge lies in optimizing different objective functions such as maximizing departure throughput, minimizing average delay, and ensuring fairness among the airlines, while simultaneously enforcing operational constraints such as wake-vortex separation minima, safely accommodating active runway crossings by taxiing aircraft, and complying with flow constraints imposed by the terminal airspace. This talk will describe a new class of techniques based on dynamic programming that can determine, in real-time, efficient runway schedules that satisfy the various operational requirements as well as upstream and downstream constraints imposed on the runway system.