A new bit of code fixes airport gridlock in 10 seconds, while the "pro" software usually sits there spinning its wheels for an hour.
arXiv · March 18, 2026 · 2603.16071
The Takeaway
Coordinating 100 planes on dual runways is so complex that 'gold-standard' industry software often fails to find a perfect schedule in a reasonable timeframe. This new approach exploits the specific physics of how aircraft interact to find the optimal landing order almost instantly.
From the abstract
In this paper, scheduling problems of aircraft minimizing the total delays on a same runway and on dual runways are studied. In contrast to the algorithms based on mixed-integer optimization models in existing works, where the optimality and the real-time performance are usually unable to be dealt with at the same time, our work focuses on the interaction mechanism between aircraft coupling with delays and two real-time optimal algorithms are proposed for the four scheduling problems by fully ex