TheRevisionReportofWCTR2007.doc

The Revision Report of WCTR2007 We would like to thank the meticulous comments from the reviewers. Grammatical and writing style errors in the original version have been corrected by our colleague who is a native English speaker. For those questions raised by reviewers in each reviewer’s report we answer and explain them item by item in the following paragraphs. These corrections based on comments and suggestions are reflected in the manuscript too. Reviewer 1 Comments: 1. The problem proposed in this paper is obviously composed of four constraints of minimum ground turn-around time, flow balance, flight swap, and maximum delay time and one objective function of minimization of total delay time. I wonder why authors transform all of these four constraints into objective functions. It is a very confused concept. Answer: In traditional method the search process is finding a candidate solution one by one and step by step. But in GA, one can find numerous candidates simultaneously. GA distinguish the feasible solutions form all candidates. For this reason the design can put the constraints and objective together into objective functions and choose the better ones for improving. 2. Please explain the encoding method of chromosome on page 14 in more detail. Since authors employ each gene to represent the “flight” flown by an aircraft, what is the value of gene? And what kind of mechanism is employed to avoid the duplicative assignment of a flight to different aircraft? Answer: For instance, the chromosome {1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,3,4,4,5,5, …, 7} represents the schedule code for the airline of flight list in Table 2. In the chromosome, every number indicates every flight schedule code. The number “1” represents the flights of the first aircraft and “2” represents that of the second aircraft and others. We defined the airport code name in Table 1 in order to programming. The chromosome only takes the order of classes that may receive the perturbation. With this mechanism one can a