Mobile Aircraft Landing Stair Scheduling

A mobile aircraft landing stair scheduling system is an important component of many intelligent airport transportation systems. We present a mobile aircraft landing stair scheduling problem, which is boarding and disembarking of aircraft passengers under the certainty of arrival time and departure time. The goal of this problem is to scheduling a set of mobile aircraft landing stairs for arrival and departure flights with an objective of minimizing total travel distance, satisfying some constraints, such as time windows and matching between aircraft sizes and mobile aircraft landing stair numbers. The main intent of this paper is to deal with challenging mobile aircraft landing stair scheduling scenarios. This mobile aircraft landing stair scheduling problem is related to the vehicle routing problem (VRP). In this problem, differing from the classic VRP, it is necessary to consider not only the impact of different aircraft scheduling on the time windows, but also the number of mobile aircraft landing stairs required by different aircraft types. A model based on VRP to minimize the total travel distance of mobile aircraft landing stair for vehicle routing problem considering time windows and aircraft sizes (VRPTW-AS) is proposed. Then CPLEX software is called to obtain optimal solution for this problem. An ant colony algorithm is developed to solve this mobile aircraft landing stair scheduling problem.