Methods for Solving the Aircraft Landing Optimization Problem

Abstract. This paper considers the problem of optimizing the sequence and time of aircraft landings, which is topical for increasing the capacity of airport runways. The main approaches to solving this problem are briefly overviewed, and its mathematical statement is provided, including the key constraints and objective functions. The exact solution method and approximate ones using genetic algorithms with two different crossover operators and a heuristic algorithm are described. The time to obtain an exact solution grows exponentially with increasing the problem dimension (the number of aircraft), which makes it impractical. Approximate methods yield a suboptimal, albeit quite good, solution in real time during aircraft landing. An original simulation software complex is presented and applied to compare the efficiency of the main methods implemented. It is proposed to use deep reinforcement learning to solve the problem.

Keywords: airport runway capacity, separation criteria between aircraft landings, optimality criteria, library of methods.

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Cite this paper

Kulida, E.L., Lebedev, V.G., and Egorov, N.A., Methods for Solving the Aircraft Landing Optimization Problem. Control Sciences 1, 57–69 (2026).