Improving runway capacity: an integrated approach using modeling, simulation, and analysis

ABSTRACT

Today, congestion and delay are common problems facing many metropolitan airports. The JPDO (Joint Planning and Development Office) is attempting to alleviate these problems by defining and implementing a number of changes including improved use of the runways and higher density operations in terminal areas along with many other concepts. Our objective is to develop guidelines for improving the runway throughput while minimizing aircraft holding times. Towards this objective, we have developed a runway arrival model that is amenable for analysis as well as simulation. While the current results target a single runway, the model can be extended to multi-runway scenarios. We have limited our current study to aircraft arrivals only. Our study exhibits a way in which both analysis and simulation can be effectively integrated to develop guidelines for managing air traffic control applications. It also establishes the importance of ensuring the timely arrival of aircraft at the metering point so as to minimize the holding times and improve runway throughput. Clustering aircraft of the same type at the metering point is also shown to reduce the holding times. The first-come-first-scheduled policy seems to be as effective as a minimum-holding-time-first scheduler. The work could be extended to include multiple runways as well as departing aircraft.

REFERENCES

• 1: Massoud Bazargan , Kenneth Fleming , Prakash Subramanian, Advanced aviation concepts via simulation: a simulation study to investigate runway capacity using TAAM, Proceedings of the 34th conference on Winter simulation: exploring new frontiers, December 08-11, 2002, San Diego, California
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• 9: Data for Douglas DC-9 Jetliner, http://www.aerospaceweb.org/aircraft/jetliner/dc9/

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
airline delay and congestion, inter-arrival distributions, metering point, modeling and simulation, runway capacity