Receding Horizon Control for Airport Capacity Management

A major goal of air traffic management is to strategically control the flow of traffic so that the demand at an airport meets but does not exceed the operational capacity in a dynamic environment. This paper uses the concept of receding horizon control (RHC) to conduct real-time planning for airport capacity management (ACM). It is shown that RHC provides a generic and flexible framework for developing real-time allocation algorithms for airport capacity in a dynamic and uncertain environment, and existing approaches such as the one step ahead adjustment can be considered as special cases of this approach. Robustness against the change of the environment and demands and computational efficiency are two advantages when applying RHC to the ACM problem, which are illustrated by a case study.