Dynamic threshold strategy improved pushback control methods for departure flight in airport

Airports play a critical role in the air transportation system and are becoming more and more congested with the repaid development of air transportation industry. The upsurge air traffic demand in airports calls for more effective traffic management techniques. As a simple and efficient method, N-control demonstrates great potential in alleviating airport congestion and reducing operational cost by deciding proper pushback times for departure flights. However, the traditional N-control method and its variants generally utilize a constant control threshold, which can not adapt well to the rapidly changing airport situations. In this work, a dynamic threshold strategy is suggested to further improve the performance of pushback control methods. Different with existing methods like N-control that generate pushback decisions only based on the flight queue length at the taxiway, the proposed dynamic threshold strategy takes advantage of more comprehensive airport surface information and successfully adjusts the control threshold according to the real-time airport state. To verify its efficiency, the dynamic threshold strategy is combined with two existing pushback control methods and two novel control approaches are developed. Simulation and comparison results indicate that the dynamic threshold strategy could significantly enhance the performance of traditional pushback control methods and reduce the total operational cost.