An Iterative Bidding Approach Applied to Cost Reduction in the Context of Aircraft Landing Problem

This paper presents an agent-based scheduling approach to solve Aircraft Landing Problem aiming at cost reduction. The focus of the research is a setting where the Air Traffic Control System entity (ATC) needs to build a flight schedule for a runway and the airlines have different costs depending on the landing time window assigned to their flights. The airlines agents' (flights) goal is to minimize the deviation between actual landing time and target landing time. On the other hand, the air traffic entity agent seeks to maximize the utilization of a runway by landing as many flights as possible. An iterative bidding mechanism is developed as the negotiation protocol between flights and ATC. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated through a computational study. The results show that the proposed decentralized scheduling approach computes high quality schedules compared to the optimal solutions derived from a centralized benchmark model, and also abide by the aviation collaborative decision-making principle.