Research Of Aircraft Pushback Control Based On Runway Capacity

The rapid development of civil aviation transportation has brought tremendous challenge to the airport operation. In peak period or under adverse weather conditions, traffic jams even large flight delays often occur, which reduce the airport running efficiency greatly. Therefore,the main objective of the research is to reduce the total taxiing time with engines on when the airport is congested. This paper aims at optimizing the aircraft pushback through routing the optimal taxiing path for the departures from the gates to the runway.Firstly, the main targets of the research in this article are introduced. Combining with the digraph theory, the configuration of the airport is abstracted into a network topology which consists of points and links. Then the airline satisfaction and taxiway load are quantified,which are connected with the aircraft actual ground taxiing time and number of aircrafts waiting or taxiing through the taxiway intersection in each time slot respectively. With the taxiing speed of the aircrafts and the wake turbulence spacing between aircrafts in taxiing as constraints, the objective function is defined to maximize the airline satisfaction, while average the taxiway load. The path planning method of departures applied to the airport taxiway system is proposed based on backpressure routing algorithm, which allocates taxiing path for the flight to avoid conflicts between flights when the airport is congestion, so as to reduce the aircraft actual taxiing time with engines on. Stability of the algorithm is verified by Lyapunov drift. Finally, the actual operating data of a large domestic hub airport is used to validate the model and algorithms. Simulate the model by using MATLAB and compare the results.Simulation results show that: the algorithm can reduce aircraft taxiing time, improve airline satisfaction, and average taxiway load. At the same time, the algorithm increases the flight punctuality situation, the throughput of the airport enhances, and the airport operating efficiency has also been significantly improved. The airports, airlines and passengers are all benefited. Constructive comments can be provided for airport capacity assessments, the subsequent Terminal addition and the airport expansion.