Reducing airport emissions with coordinated pushback processes: A case study

Empirical research has shown that airside ground operations imply a significant percentage of overall airport-related emissions. Among those operations, taxiing is one of the most emission-intensive processes, directly related to the initial pushback process that has a significant impact on the taxiing duration of departing flights. Possible approaches for an effective management of pushbacks at an airport are simulation and optimization models. Airside operations at major airports involve a complex interplay of many operations and parties and therefore need to be planned in a coordinated fashion. Yet, existing approaches have not been applied in a comprehensive planning environment for airside operations. In this work, we develop an algorithm-based relocation approach for pushback vehicles that enables an effective minimization of delays and emissions during the taxiing process. As a result alternative sequences of departing flights are evaluated against each other to find the ones with least total emissions and delay. These algorithms are applied in a simulation environment and evaluated against real-world cases. Preliminary results demonstrate that we are able to solve the underlying pushback routing problem in appropriate computational times for dynamic decision support needed at airports.