Integration of AMAN and DMAN using Particle Swarm Optimization

The problem of sequencing arrivals and departures on airport runways is one of the most important challenge for current and future ATM. Presently only few airports in Europe use Departure and Arrival management systems: respectively DMAN (Departure Manager) and AMAN (Arrival Manager). The First Come First Served principle is often used to define the sequence of arrivals on a runway and the sequence of departures at the holding points; Air Traffic Controllers try to insert each departure between arrival flights maintaining the appropriate separation. This results in non efficient systems from the perspective of delays, fuel consumption and workload of both pilots and controllers. The goal of this research is to optimize the sequence of runway utilization, in terms of arriving and departing aircraft, that produces the minimum average delay for the airport system. For this purpose a Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm is designed and implemented over real air traffic data. The algorithm redefines the sequence taking into account constraints derived from a realistic shift of the aircraft position and CFMU flow restrictions. As a result, a delay is assigned to each aircraft arriving or departing from the airport: it corresponds to the delay on the start-up or on the beginning of the approach that makes it possible to optimize the traffic flow on the runways.