Aircraft landing problems with aircraft classes

This article focuses on the aircraft landing problem that is to assign landing times to aircraft approaching the airport under consideration. Each aircraft’s landing time must be in a time interval encompassing a target landing time. If the actual landing time deviates from the target landing time additional costs occur which depend on the amount of earliness and lateness, respectively. The objective is to minimize overall cost. We consider the set of aircraft being partitioned into aircraft classes such that two aircraft of the same class are equal with respect to wake turbulence. We develop algorithms to solve the corresponding problem. Analyzing the worst case run-time behavior, we show that our algorithms run in polynomial time for fairly general cases of the problem. Moreover, we present integer programming models. We show by means of a computational study how optimality properties can be used to increase efficiency of standard solvers.