In view of the common U-shaped apron structure of large- and medium-sized airports at home and abroad, this study considered the optimization design and performance evaluation of the U-shaped apron operation procedure. First, by analyzing the physical structure characteristics and traffic operation characteristics of the U-shaped area, exclusive, partition-shared, and global-shared operation procedures of the U-shaped area were designed, and differentiated apron-operation rules and traffic models were constructed for different types of operation procedures. Then, from the perspectives of safety, efficiency, and environmental protection, a multi-dimensional evaluation index system of U-shaped area operation performance is established, and a classification measurement and comprehensive evaluation method based on critique is proposed. Finally, a traffic simulation model was established based on airport network topology modeling. We used Monte Carlo methods for the simulation in Python 3.6, and the experimental results show that, in the scenario of high-density traffic operation, compared with exclusive and partition-shared procedures, the implementation effect of the global shared procedure is very significant, and the apron operation capacity increased by 14.8% and 5.0%, respectively. The probability of aircraft conflict decreased by 32.2% and 11.8%, respectively, and the time of single conflict relief decreased by 16.1 s and 10.6 s, respectively. The average resource utilization in each U-shaped area increased by 66% and 25%, respectively, while the average daily carbon emissions of a single aircraft were reduced by 16.7 kg and 11.0 kg and the average daily fuel consumption of a single aircraft were reduced by 3.6 kg and 2.4 kg, respectively. The proposed method is scientific and effective and can provide theoretical and methodological support for optimizing the configuration of the scene operation mode of complex airports and for improving flight operation efficiency.

The update and iteration of the airport facilities completed in the runway operation system raise a request for more scientific control operation restrictions. In the old, optimized method of flight slot, no consideration was given to the runway operation strategy. As a result, the flight slot failed to meet the operation restriction and would incur unavoidable delays. This paper sets the research objective as the system composed of an apron, runway entrance and exit, and parallel runway. It focuses on matching the corresponding relationship between time and space of flights in the studied system. It establishes three flight slot optimization models to meet the requirements of isolated operation, semi-mixed operation, and mixed operation, respectively. On a practical level, the computer simulation software AirTOp is employed for simulation verification in the example of Wuhan Tianhe Airport. The results show that the delay in the isolation operation mode is reduced by about 59%, the semi-mixed operating mode reduces delays by about 48%, and mixed operating mode delays are reduced by approximately 52%. Therefore, it proves its feasibility of effective reduction in overall delay and its ability to provide decision support for the allocation of the flight time resource in parallel dual runway airports.

Considering similar air traffic control techniques for the present based on close historical dates is a good approach due to the unpredictability of weather and air traffic, as well as to increase controller efficiency. A K-prototype clustering technique and grey correlation analysis are proposed to discover similar days to address the problem of similar identification. Firstly, the weather and air traffic datasets are used to create a set of features broken down into numerical and categorical attributes. Secondly, the historical data are clustered using the K-prototype clustering, which is then paired with grey correlation analysis to identify days similar to the reference day and examine the traffic management initiatives employed on that day. Finally, the research uses actual weather information and aircraft schedules from Nanjing Lukou International Airport as examples. The outcomes demonstrate that the similar days picked by the model are representative and can serve as a foundation for airport controllers' decision-making.