Pierrick Burgain

Optimizing Pushback Decisions to Valuate Airport Surface Surveillance Information

As airport surface surveillance technologies develop, aircraft ground position information becomes more easily available and accurate. This paper provides a better understanding of the value of future surface surveillance systems where departures, and more specifically pushback times, will be optimized. It analytically quantifies the potential benefits yielded by providing surveillance information to the agent or system that is entrusted with tactically optimizing pushback clearances under nominal conditions. A stochastic model of surface operations is developed for single-ramp surface operations and calibrated to emulate departure surface operations at LaGuardia Airport. Two levels of information are examined within a tactically optimized collaborative decision-making framework. For each level, emissions, number of taxiing aircraft, and runway utilization rate are analyzed and compared with a simple threshold policy to evaluate surface surveillance information. Safety benefits, however, are not considered in this paper. It is estimated that optimally controlling pushback clearances from a single-ramp area using detailed surface surveillance information does not provide significant benefits when compared with controlling pushback clearances using a gate-holding policy based on the number of aircraft currently taxiing. However, when the runway is functioning at intermediate capacity (50%-72% runway utilization rates), e.g., under adverse weather conditions, surveillance information may improve optimization of departure operations. In such case, emissions and the number of taxiing aircraft are reduced by up to 6% when compared with the gate-holding policy and by up to 3% when compared with the performance of an intelligent operator with limited information.

On the value of information within a collaborative decision making framework for airport departure operations

As airport surface surveillance technologies develop, aircraft ground position information becomes more easily available and accurate. The value of these technologies, and more particularly the value of surface surveillance information, can be derived from the operational enhancements they provide within Air Traffic operations. This article provides a better understanding of the value of surface surveillance systems within tomorrows collaborative framework, where departures, and more specifically push-back times, will be collaboratively optimized. It quantifies analytically the potential benefits yielded by providing surveillance information to the agent which is entrusted with tactically optimizing push-back and taxi clearances under nominal conditions. This work proposes a novel approach to the valuation of surveillance information. A stochastic model of surface operations is developed and calibrated to emulate departure surface operations at LaGuardia Airport. Two levels of information are examined within a tactically optimized Collaborative Decision Making framework. For each level, emissions and number of taxiing aircraft are analyzed in order to determine the value of surveillance information. Safety benefits, however, are not considered in this paper. It was estimated that surface surveillance information could improve optimization of departure operations, by reducing emissions and the number of taxiing aircraft by 5.7%, without impacting the runway utilization rate.

Valuating surface surveillance technology for collaborative multiple-spot control of airport departure operations

Airport departure operations constitute an important source of airline delays and passenger frustration. Excessive surface traffic is the cause of increased controller and pilot workload; It is also the source of increased emissions; It worsens traffic safety and often does not yield improved runway throughput. Acknowledging this fact, this paper explores some of the feedback mechanisms by which airport traffic can be optimized in real time according to its current degree of congestion. In particular, it examines the environmnetal benefits that improved surveillance technologies can bring in the context of gate — or spot-release aircraft strategies. It is shown that improvements can lead yield 4% to 6% emission reductions for busy airports like New-York La Guardia or Seattle Tacoma. These benefits come on top of the benefits already obtained by adopting threshold strategies currently under evaluation.

Benefits from Collaborative Flow Planning of Alternative Route Options

Collaboration between the service providers and users of the national airspace system is currently limited to strategic traffic flow management planning. Extending the collaboration to mitigating localized flow constraints is expected to result in benefits including increasing the available solutions and incorporating user preferences in these solutions. This paper presents preliminary analytical results for the benefits from collaborative planning of alternative route options available to the users when imposing a flow plan. It describes a collaboration scheme and models supporting a fast-time simulation of this collaboration. The simulation is used to demonstrate and quantify how flow planning collaboration can improve the utilization of airspace resources through the negotiation of alternative routes. Simple scenarios are used to investigate the impact of various user and service provider collaboration behaviors such as the type of user preferences and the criteria the service provider uses for accepting and rejecting user preferences on the obtained benefits. Insights are gained on the tradeoff between the increased flexibility through additional route options and the increased complexity of the flow plan.

Valuating Surface Surveillance Technology for Collaborative Multiple-Spot Control of Airport Departure Operations

Airport departure operations are a source of airline delays and passenger frustration. Excessive surface traffic is a cause of increased controller and pilot workload. It is also a source of increased emissions and delays, and it does not yield improved runway throughput. Leveraging the extensive past research on airport departure management, this paper explores the environmental and safety benefits that improved surveillance technologies can bring in the context of gate- or spot-release strategies. This paper shows that improved surveillance technologies can yield a 4%-6% reduction of the average number of aircraft on the taxiway system during congested operations, and therefore emissions, in addition to the savings currently observed by implementing threshold-based metering strategies under evaluation at Bostons Logan Airport and other busy airports during congested periods. These calculated benefits contrast sharply with our previous work, which relied on simplified airport ramp areas with a single departure spot and where fewer environmental and economic benefits of advanced surface surveillance systems could be established. Our work is illustrated by its application to New Yorks LaGuardia and Seattle-Tacoma airports in Washington.

Traffic Flow Management exploiting increased navigation performance

This paper describes a Traffic Flow Management stochastic optimization model that exploits increased navigation performance. The model integrates Traffic Flow Management strategies and avionics capabilities for the Next Generation Air Transportation System. It generates Traffic Management Initiatives that are designed to improve National Airspace System performance and considers best-equipped best-served prioritization schemes. This work extends previous approaches by considering Required Navigation Performance levels in the Super-Dense Operations airspace with probabilistic weather scenarios to minimize ground and en route holding delays. The paper also presents results of simulation experiments in which the feasibility of the optimization model was evaluated using several scenarios for a Super-Dense Operations problem around Chicago, including varied demand levels, Required Navigation Performance equipage distributions, and weather scenarios. The results show that without improved navigation performance system delays may increase up to five times with the expected threefold demand growth. Simulations also showed that the majority of delays may be eliminated with improved Required Navigation Performance equipage and Traffic Flow Management algorithms properly exploiting increased navigation performance.

Variable-Length Link Transmission Model For Trac Flow Management

A Variable-Length Link Transmission Model for Tra c Flow Management (TFM) is developed and implemented. The model is derived from the spatial reduction of a Multicommodity Large Capacity Cell Transmission Model for en route tra c. Like the Cell Transmission Model, our Link Transmission Model is based on an aggregation of historical air tra c data, and minimizes total aircraft ight time by selecting aircraft holding and routing decisions. Compared to the Cell Transmission formulation, the Link Transmission formulation decreases the number of variables by a factor of eight without impacting the accuracy of the model. Also, solving and processing time is reduced by up to 90%.