Validation of multi-objective optimization for total airport management

Mobility is a key aspect for today’s society. Whether or not a desired high level mobility is achieved, is significantly influenced by airports, which are a central interface between ground and air traffic and, thus, impact the total transportation system and its quality. That today’s airports do not optimally foster mobility, is, for instance, impressively demonstrated by punctuality statistics: Unpunctuality rates of airports reach about 20%. The majority of these mobility issues can be traced back to an inefficient use of the airports’ capacities, which are, in turn, caused by the low level of interconnection between the great number of processes owned by the various stakeholders at an airport (e.g., airlines, ground handlers, air traffic control, airport company, etc.). To improve these numbers and yield a high level of efficient mobility, a total airport management concept has been introduced which aims at optimizing the key performance areas “capacity”, “cost effectiveness”, “efficiency”, and “environmental sustainability”. It proposes to automate the allocation of resources at airports and to manually negotiate the allocation with all stakeholders involved, if the automation fails to derive an acceptable plan. The paper at hand introduces this human-machine interaction to yield a multi-objective optimization and summarizes first results