Solving Large Aircraft Landing Problems on Multiple Runways by Applying a Constraint Programming Approach

Aircraft Landing Problem is to assign an airport’s runways to the arrival aircraft as well as to schedule the landing time of these aircraft. In this paper, due to the complexity of the problem, which is NP-hard, we develop an iterative-based heuristic by exploiting special characteristics of the problem. Computational results show the developed approach is quite competitive, and obtain optimal and near optimal solutions for instances with up to 500 aircraft in a reasonable amount of time. The algorithm outperforms the best known solutions available for the problem, while it’s required computational time is at most 10% of that of the best available algorithm for the problem.