Dynamic Runway Configurations and Flexible Arrival/Departure Tradeoffs in Metroplex Airports

Runway system is central to airport capacity. Its inefficient ultilization has been identified as a major source of airport congestions. This paper analyzes the patterns of demand-capacity imbalance and design a series of flexible strategies for air traffic demand management (ATDM), and then optimize runway configurations in metroplex (i.e. multi-airport system) airports, under a set of tradeoff settings for arrival and departure priorities. An optimization model with 4 imbalance cases, 11 tradeoff scenarios and 2 configuration strategies, are proposed to minimize the flight holding cost and the number of adjusted flights. The proposed evolutionary algorithm can obtain close-to optimal results with a very low computational cost. A case study of the Shanghai metroplex airports shows that, compared with the traditional static strategy, the proposed dynamic strategy can significantly reduce the number of adjusted flights. The proposed framework in this paper can be applied on pre-tactical (i.e. one-day planning) as well as tactical (i.e. 2-h rolling horizon) levels, to keep the balance between high demand and limited capacity through flexible ATDM options.