A Constructive Heuristic Approach for Single Airport Slot Allocation Problems

With growth in air transportation expected to continue, the mitigation of operational inefficiency and consequent delays is becoming increasingly important. Slot allocation, as a means of demand management at congested airports, has a significant impact on wider airport operations. This requires sophisticated approaches, to intelligently allocate scarce airport resources to unevenly distributed traffic demand for the use of airport facilities. This paper presents a novel heuristic approach to solve the single airport slot allocation problem. The approach has been tested on real-world data from three medium-sized airports. We introduce a constructive heuristic framework which is able to generate feasible solutions to the model. Within this framework, a number of ordering heuristics are developed to order slot requests to be scheduled, and an allocation algorithm is developed to allocate slots to a request determined by the ordering heuristic. Experimental results suggest that the order in which slot requests are scheduled has a significant impact on the solution quality.