A Review of Aircraft Taxiway Positioning and Navigation Systems

With the continuous expansion of air transportation, airport surface operations are facing increasing pressure in terms of safety and efficiency. During the taxiing phase, aircraft operate in a complex and densely trafficked environment, which is highly susceptible to structural constraints and information uncertainty, leading to risks such as runway incursions and surface conflicts. In this context, improving positioning accuracy and navigation support during the taxiing phase has become a critical means of ensuring safe airport surface operations. This paper presents a comprehensive review of research on aircraft taxiway positioning and navigation systems. From a technical perspective, it focuses on analyzing the characteristics and limitations of satellite-based positioning methods, ground surveillance and sensor-based positioning techniques, vision-based and intelligent perception approaches, and multi-source information fusion positioning technologies in airport surface scenarios. On this basis, recent advances in aircraft taxiway path planning and navigation methods are further reviewed, including multi-objective path optimization, taxi navigation under dynamic operating environments, and navigation decision-support techniques. This review provides a systematic understanding of the main research directions and development trends in aircraft taxiway positioning and navigation systems, and serves as a reference for future research and engineering applications.