Improved approach for time‐based taxi trajectory planning towards conflict‐free, efficient and fluent airport ground movement

The ever‐growing air traffic demand arouses an urgent need for improved airport ground movement efficiency. New operational concepts are emerging which use time‐based taxi trajectories to reduce uncertainty and make more efficient use of the airport resource. In this study, an improved approach is proposed for time‐based taxi trajectory planning, which is formulated as the shortest path problem with time windows and the maximum traversal time constraint. With the introduction of the taxi time in the cost and the maximum traversal time constraint to limit the waiting time, more efficient and fluent ground movement of aircraft can be realised. An A*‐based solution algorithm is developed for the investigated problem, which utilises the arrival time interval and dominance‐based comparison to search for the best solution. Experimental results on real‐world problem instances demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach as well as its advantages over the existing approach.