A two-phase total optimization on aircraft stand assignment and tow-tractor routing considering energy-saving and attributes

The continued air traffic growth leads to more fuel consumption for the total aviation operation. Studying how to achieve energy-saving operations through a more reasonable strategy under the existing technology is still significant. This study first constructs a two-stage global operational energy optimization model with stand assignment and GSE routing problems, then distinguishes the scheduling of ground vehicles based on task attributes through a mathematical approach and also improves the initialization and cross-variance approach of the NSGA-II algorithm to reduce the number of infeasible solutions and improve the solution speed. A case study is carried out with the operational data of a Chinese airport, and the results show that the strategy can help achieve about a 5% of reduction in operational fuel consumption. This study can provide theoretical support and a technical basis for airport management to formulate relevant strategies.