Tactical routing for air transportation in HKIA terminal maneuvering area

Abstract

Terminal maneuvering area is a bottleneck for arrival air traffic flow, causing delays in peak times with excessive demands. To reduce the air traffic control’s workload and mitigate congestion, numerous studies attempt to derive practical solutions from ground transportation and logistics to coordinate aircraft. Besides real-time practical infeasibility, the generic nature of proposed coordination models makes them directly inapplicable to realistic problems. Hence, we construct a simplified yet applicable model, deploying the mixed-integer linear programming approach, to obtain optimal coordination for arrival aircraft in the terminal maneuvering area of Hong Kong International Airport. In an effort to practicalize our model, we tune its parameters by applying extracted air traffic operation features from historical flight trajectory data. Results illustrate that our methodology is beneficial in tactically routing aircraft and suggesting optimal landing sequences in comparison with historical practices.