Harmony search algorithm for the multiple runways aircraft landing scheduling problem

This paper proposes a harmony search (hs) algorithm to solve the multiple runways aircraft landing scheduling (als) problem. als is a combinatorial optimization problem that has been recognized as an np-hard problem. it deals with assigning landing times and runways for a set of arrival aircrafts. each aircraft has its predefined target landing time within a time window,and a separation time between each successive pairs of aircrafts. the objective of als problem is to minimize the deviation from the target landing time of each aircraft subject to a set of constraints. the performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on thirteen benchmark instances ranging from 10 to 500 aircrafts,and 1 to 5 runways. the results show that the proposed algorithm works considerably well on small-sized instances.