A real-time Active Routing approach via a database for airport surface movement

Airports face challenges due to the increasing volume of air traffic and tighter environmental restrictions which result in a need to actively integrate speed profiles into conventional routing and scheduling procedure. However, only until very recently, the research on airport ground movement has started to take into account such a speed profile optimisation problem actively so that not only time efficiency but also fuel saving and decrease in airport emissions can be achieved at the same time. It is envisioned that the realism of planning could also be improved through speed profiles. However, due to the multi-objective nature of the problem and complexity of the investigated models (objective functions), the existing speed profile optimisation approach features high computational demand and is not suitable for an on-line application. In order to make this approach more competitive for real-world application and to meet limits imposed by International Civil Aviation Organization for on-line decision time, this paper introduces a pre-computed database acting as a middleware to effectively separate the planning (routing and scheduling) module and the speed profile generation module. Employing a database not only circumvents duplicative optimisation for the same taxiway segments, but also completely avoids the computation of speed profiles during the on-line decision support owing a great deal to newly proposed database initialization procedures. Moreover, the added layer of database facilitates, in the future, more complex and realistic models to be considered in the speed profile generation module, without sacrificing on-line decision time. The experimental results carried out using data from a major European hub show that the proposed approach is promising in speeding up the search process.