Integrated Runway-Taxiway-Apron Allocation for Aircraft Movement Based on Traffic Characteristics

Severe congestion at airport surface has now become a major challenge in air traffic management. Earlier work on congestion mitigation for traffic on airport surface has made primary contributions on efficiency improvement from the view of resource assignment, so as to enlarge the current resource utility. However, subject to the complexity of modeling and unacceptable computational cost, integrated runway-taxiway-apron allocation for aircraft was rarely reported.This paper introduces a macroscopic view on flow characteristics of airport surface traffic, breaking through the traditional perspective of independent optimization of runway, taxiway and apron operations, in order to adapt the road traffic assignment method to airport surface movement to allocate runway, taxiway and apron for each aircraft while minimizing total cost of the surface network system.