A new dynamic pushback control method for reducing fuel-burn costs: Using predicted taxi-out time

Long departure-taxi-out time leads to significant airport surface congestion, fuel-burn costs, and excessive emissions of greenhouse gases. To reduce these undesirable effects, a Predicted taxi-out time-based Dynamic Pushback Control (PDPC) method is proposed. The implementation of this method requires two steps: first, the taxi-out times for aircraft are predicted by the least-squares support-vector regression approach of which the parameters are optimized by an introduced improved Firefly algorithm. Then, a dynamic pushback control model equipped with a linear gate-hold penalty function is built, along with a proposed iterative taxiway queue-threshold optimization algorithm for solving the model. A case study with data obtained from Beijing International airport (PEK) is presented. The taxi-out time prediction model achieves predictive accuracy within 3 min and 5 min by 84.71% and 95.66%, respectively. The results of the proposed pushback method show that total operation cost and fuel-burn cost achieve a 14.0% and 21.1% reduction, respectively, as compared to the traditional K-control policy. (3) From the perspective of implementation, using PDPC policy can significantly reduce the queue length in taxiway and taxi-out time. The total operation cost and fuel-burn cost can be curtailed by 37.2% and 52.1%, respectively, as compared to the non-enforcement of any pushback control mechanism. These results show that the proposed pushback control model can reduce fuel-burn costs and airport surface congestion effectively.