First Friday Webinars – Optimisation for airports – London Heathrow

Dr Jason Atkin is a member of the Computational Optimisation and Learning lab in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. He has been working with NATS and Heathrow airport since he started his PhD on the topic in late 2003. Although he has also worked on various other airport optimisation and modelling problems, his work has primarily been focusing on real-world runway sequencing at the airport, considering the ‘often messy’ real world constraints and characteristics of the problems. Having previously been a software engineer in industry, he applied various software engineering techniques to the challenge, which gives a somewhat different perspective to the usual academic approaches.

This talk will discuss the work with NATS and Heathrow, which contributed to Heathrow being able to predict take-off times accurately enough to gaining CDM compliance. Various versions of the problem will be discussed, introducing both the real world situation at Heathrow and considering the various academic simplifications that have sometimes been used for similar problems, and their implications in the real world. Ongoing work with Heathrow is still providing further enhancements and improvements over time.

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