A Comprehensive Survey on Multiple-Runway Aircraft Landing Optimization Problem

The significant increase in civil aircraft traffic has led to frequent congestion and various negative outcomes within the terminal area. To mitigate these challenges, addressing and studying the aircraft landing problem (ALP) well are essential. This problem involves arranging the sequence of aircraft on airport runways and scheduling their operations while accounting for multiple operational constraints. Air traffic control is known as an optimization and ongoing problem with multi-objective challenges. In this survey paper, we propose a comprehensive review of the latest studies on the ALP in which we cover a wide variety of methodologies, including mixed-integer programming, dynamic programming, heuristics, meta-heuristics, and reinforcement learning techniques. This survey also proposes a classification of the ALP and summarizes all the identified constraints, objectives, frequency of their occurrence, and datasets used by these studies consisting of one or multiple runways. In addition, based on the existing literature, we discuss the advantages, such as delay and pollution minimization, and disadvantages, such as problem size unscalability and limiting the problem to single-runway mode.