Roland A. A. Wijnen

Optimization of Noise Abatement Departure Trajectories

This paper describes the development of a new tool that offers significant capabilities for the analysis and design of noise abatement procedures at any given airport. The proposed tool combines a noise model, a geographic information system and a dynamic trajectory optimization algorithm. The optimization algorithm essentially modifies routings and flightpaths such as to minimize the noise impact in the residential communities surrounding the airport, while satisfying all imposed operational and safety constraints. Numerical examples, involving departure trajectories from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, are included to demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the developed tool. Although the results obtained to date are for departure flights only, the employed methodology tool holds out equal promise for application to approach trajectories. In the numerical examples the characteristics of a Boeing 737-300 aircraft are used.

Decision Support for Airport Strategic Planning

Abstract Master Planning is currently the dominant approach to airport strategic planning. However, history shows that this approach can often result in costly mistakes. Because there are many stakeholders with conflicting objectives, deep uncertainty about the future, and many potential strategies, planners often narrow their scope by using a single forecast for the future, leaving out alternative strategies, and excluding stakeholders, resulting in a Master Plan that quickly becomes obsolete and may be opposed by some stakeholders. What is needed is a flexible, integrated approach that enables collaboration among stakeholders. Such an approach can be facilitated using a Decision Support System (DSS) that provides a way for decisionmakers and stakeholders to evaluate alternatives quickly and easily with respect to their outcomes of interest. We present the conceptual design for a DSS called HARMOS, showing how it meets the high-level requirements for airport strategic planning while addressing the problems associated with Master Planning.

Development of a Runway Allocation Optimisation Model for Airport Strategic Planning

Abstract This paper describes the development of a runway allocation optimisation model to be used for airport strategic planning. It optimises the allocation of flights to runways on an annual basis, with respect to delay, noise and safety. The multi-objective optimisation is subject to a number of constraints, related to operational procedures, runway capacity and weather conditions. To reach a final non-dominated solution for the multi-objective problem, an interactive optimisation method has been implemented. This has resulted in a very convenient and easy-to-use optimisation procedure. Although the model has to be extended to handle more complex operational situations, the results with respect to the reduction of aircraft noise annoyance and total third-party risk are promising.

The Airport Business Suite: A Decision Support System for Airport Strategic Exploration

* Associate Fellow AIAA, Lecturer † PhD. Researcher ‡ Professor § Airport Consultant ** Research Associate ABSTRACT The airport business is dynamic, competitive, complex, and unpredictable. Development and growth of any large airport depends on its ability to balance business realities, long-term expansion requirements and societal requirements. TU Delft Airport Development Center (TUD-ADC) is developing an integrated set of models, called the Airport Business Suite (ABS), that will help advisors involved in Airport Strategic Exploration (ASE) to quickly and easily explore future scenarios and policy options, improve understanding and insight into the main business drivers and risk factors, and generate information for decision making in an efficient, effective, and consistent manner. The ABS is to be a generic set of software tools that can be customized to help any airport address a wide range of issues under a wide variety of circumstances in situations of high uncertainty. It is a computer-based system for decision support that will enable users to obtain, through a graphical user interface, consistent information about all facets of the airport’s business (for current and future situations) at the desired level of aggregation. This paper describes the ASE process, model development, ABS development, the initial ABS prototype and planned future developments. It focuses not on the individual pieces of the ABS, but on its overall capabilities and how the individual pieces were combined into a consistent, integrated organizational decision support system. It describes the tying together of models and the integration of a human decisionmaker into the system of models. A working prototype of the ABS model system has been built and tested for a hypothetical airport. Moreover, it has been used for educational purposes in our course ‘Strategic Planning for Airport Systems’.

Optimal departure trajectories with respect to sleep disturbance

This paper describes on-going research in the field of trajectory optimization with respect to noise. Recently, this resulted in a tool in which the Integrated Noise Model, a Geographic Information System and a dynamic trajectory optimization algorithm are combined. This tool has proved to be effective in analyzing noise abatement procedures for departure. With this tool, optimized departure trajectories were generated by using a composite performance index which incorporated a noise related and a fuel related parameter. This resulted in minimumfuel trajectories that were locally adjusted for noise considerations. However, such a minimum-fuel trajectory is not very realistic from an operational point of view. Therefore, this study proposes a different composition of the performance index. The performance index that is used in the present study incorporates the deviation from a reference flight path instead of a fuel parameter. In this way, a reference flight can be selected that is more practical. A trajectory optimized using the modified performance index will deviate from the reference track only if this improves the noise impact. It is also shown that, depending on the scenario, two instruments, i.e., a thrust cutback or lateral movement, are employed to a different extent in order to achieve a noise reduction.  2002 Éditions scientifiques et médicales Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.