Optimization of Taxiway Traversal at Congested Airports

Airport runways and taxiways have been identified as a key source of system-wide congestion and delay in the over-strained commercial air traffic system. To combat this growing problem, we present a novel approach for taxiway scheduling and traversal. Aircraft must traverse a taxiway, represented by a graph, from gates to their respective runways and arrive at their scheduled times while adhering to safety separation constraints. We describe a combinatorial mixed integer linear program to simultaneously determine the optimal pushback time windows, aircraft speeds, stopping times, and in particular, traversal paths for a given graph and an imposed flight schedule. Several scenarios are presented to demonstrate possible uses for this tool.