A Dynamic Hyper-Heuristic Based on Scatter Search for the Aircraft Landing Scheduling Problem

Aircraft Landing Scheduling (ALS) attempts to determine the landing time for each aircraft. The objective of ALS is to minimise the deviations of the landing time of each aircraft from its target landing time. In this paper, we propose a dynamic hyper-heuristic algorithm for the ALS problem. In our approach, the Scatter Search algorithm is chosen as the high level heuristic to build a chain of intensification and diversification priority rules, which are applied to generate the landing sequence by different priority rules, which are low level heuristics in the hyper-heuristic framework. The landing time for each aircraft can be calculated efficiently based on the landing sequence. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can obtain high quality solutions for ALS.