A Constructive Heuristic Approach for Single Airport Slot Allocation Problems

Wang, S. and Drake, J.H. and Fairbrother, J. and Woodward, J.R. and Society, IEEE; IEEE Computational Intelligence (2020) A Constructive Heuristic Approach for Single Airport Slot Allocation Problems. In: 2019 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, SSCI 2019 :. IEEE, pp. 1171-1178. ISBN 9781728124865

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Abstract

With growth in air transportation expected to continue, the mitigation of operational inefficiency and consequent delays is becoming increasingly important. Slot allocation, as a means of demand management at congested airports, has a significant impact on wider airport operations. This requires sophisticated approaches, to intelligently allocate scarce airport resources to unevenly distributed traffic demand for the use of airport facilities. This paper presents a novel heuristic approach to solve the single airport slot allocation problem. The approach has been tested on real-world data from three medium-sized airports. We introduce a constructive heuristic framework which is able to generate feasible solutions to the model. Within this framework, a number of ordering heuristics are developed to order slot requests to be scheduled, and an allocation algorithm is developed to allocate slots to a request determined by the ordering heuristic. Experimental results suggest that the order in which slot requests are scheduled has a significant impact on the solution quality.