Abstract: In order to deal with the influence of the random flight arrivals on the scheduling of airport ground service resources, a rolling horizon scheduling method (RHSM) is designed according to the characteristics of the problem. Firstly, the original problem is decomposed into a series of subproblems according to the time axis. Then, with the objective of minimizing the total cost of flight delays and balancing the load of similar resources, a mathematical model of project-resource hierarchical scheduling is established to schedule the subproblems in the rolling horizon of each iteration. Finally, the solution of each subproblem is constructed into the approximate solution of the original problem. In this way, the complex problem is decomposed into several subproblems, which can be solved one by one, ensuring real-time resource scheduling. The performance of this method is verified by the data from three different scales on a certain day at Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport: 01:00-02:00, 15:00-16:00 and 13:00-21:00. Experimental results show that RHSM can deal with the randomness of flight arrival time; compared with the time window decoupled scheduling method, in small-scale data from 01:00-02:00, when the total solution time is the same, RHSM with appropriate parameters can reduce the total cost of flight delays by 36.79%; in medium and large-scale data from 15:00-16:00 and 13:00-21:00, RHSM has faster solution speed with smaller computer memory space. It can be concluded that the proposed method is feasible, and it is helpful to improve the quality and efficiency of airport ground services.

Key words: air transportation, ground service resource scheduling, rolling horizon, shared resources, multi-project scheduling, dynamic scheduling