• Energy Research

This paper draws upon earlier work, which developed a multiobjective speed profile generation framework for unimpeded taxiing aircraft. Here, we deal with how to seamlessly integrate such efficient speed profiles into a holistic decision-making framework. The availability of a set of nondominated unimpeded speed profiles for each taxiway segment, with respect to conflicting objectives, has the potential to significantly impact upon airport ground movement research. More specifically, the routing and scheduling function that was previously based on distance, emphasizing time efficiency, could now be based on richer information embedded within speed profiles, such as the taxiing times along segments, the corresponding fuel consumption, and the associated economic implications. The economic implications are exploited over a day of operation, to take into account cost differences between busier and quieter times of the airport. Therefore, a more cost-effective and tailored decision can be made, respecting the environmental impact. Preliminary results based on the proposed approach show a 9%-50% reduction in time and fuel respectively for two international airports: Zurich and Manchester. The study also suggests that, if the average power setting during the acceleration phase could be lifted from the level suggested by the International Civil Aviation Organization, ground operations may simultaneously improve both time and fuel efficiency. The work described in this paper aims to open up the possibility to move away from the conventional distance-based routing and scheduling to a more comprehensive framework, capturing the multifaceted needs of all stakeholders involved in airport ground operations.

With increasing air traffic, rising fuel costs and tighter environmental targets, efficient airport ground operations are one of the key aspects towards sustainable air transportation. This complex system includes elements such as ground movement, runway scheduling and ground services. Previously, these problems were treated in isolation since information, such as landing time, pushback time and aircraft ground position, are held by different stakeholders with sometimes conflicting interests and, normally, are not shared. However, as these problems are interconnected, solutions as a result of isolated optimisation may achieve the objective of one problem but fail in the objective of the other one, missing the global optimum eventually. Potentially more energy and economic costs are thus required. In order to apply a more systematic and holistic view, this paper introduces a multi-objective integrated optimisation problem incorporating the newly proposed Active Routing concept. Built with systematic perspectives, this new model combines several elements: scheduling and routing of aircraft, 4-Dimensional Trajectory (4DT) optimisation, runway scheduling and airport bus scheduling. A holistic economic optimisation framework is also included to support the decision maker to select the economically optimal solution from a Pareto front of technically optimal solutions. To solve this problem, a multi-objective genetic algorithm is adopted and tested on real data from an international hub airport. Preliminary results show that the proposed approach is able to provide a systematic framework so that airport efficiency, environmental assessment and economic analysis could all be explicitly optimised.