Airport surface congestion can lead to significantly long taxi-out times, increased fuel-burn costs, and excessive emissions of greenhouse gases. To curtail these undesirable effects, we propose multiple hybrid penalty-based dynamic pushback control (HPDPC) policies that employ penalty functions dependent on both the taxiway queue limit and the current queue length to ration the pushback frequency at airports, and trades taxiway queueing times with gate-hold delays to minimize the total operational cost (fuel-burn and gate-hold costs). Using data from Beijing Capital International (PEK) airport, the performance of the proposed policies are compared with that of the no-control (baseline) policy, the traditional K-control policy, and the recently proposed penalty-based dynamic pushback control policy. Detailed Monte Carlo simulations that study the sensitivity of the total cost function to various problem parameters are presented, and our results indicate that deploying a HPDPC policy that is more stringent than the N-control policy but more flexible than the PDPC policy can be beneficial. Additionally, we also show that deploying a very stringent policy can be detrimental to overall system performance, thereby validating the practical efficacy of the proposed HPDPC policies.

CICTP