A novel bi-objective model for sustainable and efficient airport logistics management: A case study on Copenhagen airport

Abstract

Due to the growing volume of air transportation and the scarcity of airport resources, aviation planners are paying more attention to the efficiency of airport resource management. Optimizing the assignment and scheduling of ground facilities plays an important role in reducing ground congestion, flight delays, and passenger dissatisfaction. To prevent any collisions among aircraft on the apron, taxi network, and runways, safety considerations should be strictly followed by traffic controllers. Minimizing taxi time is another matter of importance in airport logistics management that helps mitigate environmental concerns (e.g., fuel consumption, tire abrasion, and noise pollution). In this study, a bi-objective mixed-integer linear programming model is developed to optimize the ground resource scheduling problem, taking into account the challenges of gate assignment, taxi planning, and runway scheduling. The model is developed in a way that includes safety and sustainability considerations. The validation of the proposed model is investigated through several examples based on Copenhagen airport using the augmented $\epsilon$-constraint method. Since the simultaneous scheduling of multiple resources is an NP-hard problem, two multi-objective metaheuristic algorithms are employed to deal with the large-scale problems. The performance of the algorithms is then compared in terms of coverage and convergence rates. Additionally, the results are discussed in detail to provide managerial implications for airport authorities.