Taxiing Route Planning for Aircraft on Airport Surface Considering Conflicts With Ground Service Vehicles

The density and complexity of airport surface traffic increase significantly with the expansion of hub airports. Conflicts may occur due to the concentration of aircraft and ground service vehicle (GSV) movements, leading to safety and congestion issues. Considering the potential conflicts with GSV routes, a strategic aircraft taxiing route planning model is proposed, which integrally optimizes apron area and runway assignments for arriving/departing aircraft, as well as their taxiing routes. Two prioritized objectives are considered for the safety of airport surface traffic and the convenience of passengers. The proposed model is validated first in an illustrative example and then applied in the real-world case of Shanghai Pudong International Airport, China. The optimal routing plan effectively reduces the conflict points between aircraft and GSVs by 29.2% and 19.0%, respectively, compared with the two typical alternative plans. To assess the impact of different management preferences on the trade-off among various locations and types of conflicts, a series of experiments are conducted by setting up different conflict weights. The results demonstrate that the optimized plan effectively reduces the number of conflicts with higher weights.