aircraft-landing-and-take-off

Aircraft scheduling for runway landing and take-off, implemented in C++ as a data structures and algorithms project.

The underlying problem is real and well studied: a fixed number of runways, a stream of aircraft with different arrival and departure windows, and hard separation requirements between operations. Allocating that capacity well is an optimisation problem, and allocating it badly has consequences considerably more serious than a slow web page.

The implementation focuses on efficient scheduling to maximise runway utilisation while respecting the constraints. The interesting design work is in the data structures: the choice of queue and priority representation determines whether the scheduler runs in reasonable time as the number of aircraft grows, and a naive structure that works for ten aircraft becomes unusable at a thousand.

C++ was the right language for the exercise. Manual memory control and predictable performance characteristics make the cost of each structural decision visible, which is the point of the exercise in a way that a garbage-collected language would obscure.

Beyond aviation, the shape of the problem generalises to resource allocation and operations research: scarce shared capacity, competing requests with timing constraints, and a scheduling policy that has to be both fair and efficient. Academic in origin, but the reasoning transfers directly to production systems that queue work against limited resources.