Operations Research Transactions ›› 2012, Vol. 16 ›› Issue (1): 67-76.

• Original Articles • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Genetic Algorithm for Aircraft Landing Problem with Predetermined Time Window and Earliness/Tardiness Penalties

 WANG  Hong1, LIN  Dan1, LI  Min-Qiang2   

  1. 1. School of Science, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China; 2. School of Management, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China;
  • Received:2011-03-24 Revised:2011-07-26 Online:2012-03-15 Published:2012-03-15
  • Supported by:

    China National Funds for Distinguished Young Scientists

Abstract: This paper considers Aircraft Landing Problem. Each aircraft lands within a predetermined time window and meets separation time requirements with other aircrafts. The objective is to minimize total weighted earliness and tardiness of all aircrafts. We suggest a genetic algorithm (GA) to solve this problem. Each chromosome contains two vectors: a sequence for landing the planes and an assignment of runways. A new decoding procedure is designed to determine the landing time for all aircraft. The computational experiments on 8 standard instances provided by the OR-Library show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the Scatter Search (SS) algorithm and the hybrid method combining Genetic Algorithms with Ant Colony Optimization (ACGA) presented in the literature. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed decoding procedure, we compare the proposed algorithm with the GA that employs the decoding procedure applied in ACGA. The results show that the proposed decoding procedure can improve the quality of the solution for the considered problem. It is applicable developing the algorithm described in this paper for a similar scheduling problem with predetermined time window and earliness/tardiness penalties.

Key words: aircraft landing, scheduling, genetic algorithm, time window, earliness/tardiness penalties