(2022-2023, funded by Hamburg Innovation GmbH, principal investigator: Professor Matthias Mnich)

The national and international air traffic of passenger and cargo planes shows for many years high growth rates, despite a one-time drop in flight movements in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and is also expected to increase in the future.

These flight movements cause enormous health and economic effects, especially in the vicinity of major airports, and ecological pollution, be it through noise and pollutant emissions including CO2 or the requirement to install soundproof structures.

One of the objectives of the European Union is therefore to significantly reduce emissions in aviation by 2032. Part of this reduction can be by planning landing approaches of aircraft more efficiently, and thus noise and pollutant emissions are reduced. Air traffic controllers in the control tower of the airport, as the decision-maker about the landing sequence, face an insurmountable number of choices in the aircraft approach, which must be in accordance with the guidelines of EUROCONTROL and the German air traffic control.

In this project we develop new algorithmic tools for this highly complex optimization problem, with the aim of making better use of existing airport capacities while reducing emissions.