With growing air traffic demand, infrastructure-constrained airports face increasing pressure to maximise runway capacity while maintaining high levels of safety and operational efficiency. Improving operational procedures plays a key role in this, as it aims to reduce delays, improve traffic flow, and make more effective use of available airspace.
This study presents a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model for the runway departure scheduling problem at Eindhoven Airbase, a single-runway airport with mixed civil and military operations. The model encodes the airport’s current Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) departure logic, including wake turbulence and radar separation, runway occupancy time, SID-dependent restrictions, and local release conditions required to maintain radar and border separation. Using data-driven scenario inputs that capture a wide range of traffic mix, runway direction, SID flown, and meteorological conditions, the model evaluates the reduction of release condition thresholds while optimising under three different objectives, namely maximising departure throughput, minimising total system delay, and minimising the maximum individual aircraft delay.
The resulting safe, regulation-compliant schedules are benchmarked against First-Come First-Served (FCFS) procedures and the optimised schedule using the current procedures. Results indicate an increase in capacity of about 20%, and a 38% reduction in delay during peak hours relative to the current procedure. The trade-off results between the three objectives align with those reported by Gupta et al. These findings show that minimising system delay leads to the best overall results, and that the current release conditions offer room for optimisation. ... Read more