Scheduling aircraft landings to balance workload of ground staff

Scheduling landings of aircrafts is an essential problem which is continuously solved as part of the daily operations of an airport control tower. All planes in the airspace of an airport are to be assigned to landing slots by the responsible air-traffic controller. The support of this decision problem with suited optimization approaches has a long lasting tradition in operations research. However, none of the former approaches investigates the impact of the landing sequence on the workload of ground staff. The paper on hand presents three novel objectives for the aircraft landing problem, which aim at leveling the workload of ground staff by evenly spreading: (1) number of landed passengers, (2) landings per airline, and (3) number of landed passengers per airline over the planning horizon. Mathematical models along with complexity results are developed and exact and heuristic solution procedures are presented.