An integrated optimisation approach to airport ground operations to foster sustainability in the aviation sector

Michal Weiszer, Jun Chen and Giorgio Locatelli

Applied Energy, 2015, vol. 157, issue C, 567-582

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Airport operations; Environmental impact; Ground movement; Multi-objective optimisation; Sustainability; Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261915004948
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:157:y:2015:i:c:p:567-582

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2015.04.039

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().