A Fast Heuristic for Aircraft Landing Scheduling with Time Windows: Application to Guarulhos Airport

Abstract

This paper focuses on the aircraft landing problem with time windows (ALP-TW), which consists of determining a landing schedule for each aircraft within a specified time window and determining the minimum required separation interval between successive operations. This NP-hard state-dependent scheduling problem plays a key role in the operational efficiency of busy airports. We propose a fast and efficient heuristic, called the CAS-TW (Closest Aircraft Sequence with Time Windows), to generate landing sequences that minimize total delay while respecting operational constraints. The method combines a greedy algorithm with a discretization strategy to explore feasible landing intervals. We validate the approach using real data from São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport (GRU), comparing the CAS-TW to traditional scheduling strategies and optimal solutions obtained via a commercial solver. Computational experiments show reductions in makespan up to 21% in theoretical datasets and 5% in real-world datasets. The CAS-TW solved instances with 50 aircraft in less than 1 s of computation time. The results showed that our algorithm was quickly implemented, equitable, easy to use, and obtained good solutions. These results translated into an increase in airport capacity.