Title: An ant colony optimisation method based on pruning technique for the aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling problem

Authors: Xiaorong Feng; Xingjie Feng; Xinglong Wang

Addresses: School of Computer Science and Technology, Civil Aviation University of China, Tianjin, China ' School of Computer Science and Technology, Civil Aviation University of China, Tianjin, China ' School of Air Traffic Management, Civil Aviation University of China, China

Abstract: Aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling (ASS) in civil aviation has become a critical concern which requires immediate attention. Pruning optimisation technique is a kind of important method to narrow the searching of candidate sets of the ASS problem. In this paper, an ant colony optimisation (ACO) algorithm based on pruning thought (termed PACO) is proposed. In the context of developing solutions to ASS problems, PACO is an improvement over traditional ant colony optimisation algorithm as it is empirically proven that PACO improves quality of solution by reducing computational burden and overcomes the problems of slow convergence speed. Experimental results show that the proposed method has stronger robustness, search ability and faster convergence rate compared with genetic and ant colony algorithm based on time-domain. It can help the traffic controllers for rapid, stable and fair scheduling.

Keywords: arrival sequencing; arrival scheduling; ant colony optimisation; ACO; pruning optimisation; aircraft arrivals; flight arrivals; civil aviation; air traffic control.

DOI: 10.1504/IJADS.2016.081394

International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences, 2016 Vol.9 No.4, pp.333 - 347

Received: 28 Jul 2016
Accepted: 08 Sep 2016

Published online: 06 Jan 2017 *

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