Scheduling aircraft take-offs and landings on interdependent and heterogeneous runways

•We discuss an aircraft scheduling problem for general runway configurations.•We provide a fast optimization approach based on dynamic programming.•We propose a rolling planning horizon heuristic that yields close-to-optimal results.•Our numerical study shows that we can increase runway capacity and reduce delays.

This paper presents an optimization method for the aircraft scheduling problem with general runway configurations. Take-offs and landings have to be assigned to a runway and a time while meeting the sequence-dependent separation requirements and minimizing the costs incurred by delays. Some runways can be used only for take-offs, landings, or certain types of aircraft while schedules for interdependent runways have to consider additional diagonal separation constraints.Our dynamic programming approach solves realistic problem instances to optimality within short computation times. In addition, we propose a rolling planning horizon heuristic for large instances that returns close-to-optimal results.