A combined arrival and departure scheduling is investigated for multi-airport system to alleviate the problem of airspace congestion and flight delay. Firstly

the scheduling problem for multi-airport system is defined through in-depth analysis of the characteristics of arrival and departure operations. Then

lots of constraints are taken into account

such as wake vortex separation

transfer separation

release separation

and operational separation in different modes of multiple runway operations. Furthermore

the scheduling model is constructed and improved simulated annealing algorithm is proposed by minimizing the total delay. Finally

Shanghai multi-airport system is chosen to conduct the simulation and validation. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method is able to effectively improve the operational efficiency of arrivals and departures for multi-airport system.