Airport Surface Operation Collaborative Automation Concept

Abstract

Limitation in airport runway throughput naturally constrains traffic capacity. For this reason, the increasing demand on capacity ultimately will require airport expansion to increase the number of runways and associated taxiways. Often the airport expansion plans necessitate an increase in the complexity of surface traffic, leading to a decrease in surface traffic efficiency, which is reflected as an increase in taxi delays. Consequently any concept to increase airport traffic capacity needs to take into account efficiency issues such as taxi delays as well as safety and operator workload issues. This paper introduces a collaborative automation concept being developed under the Surface Operation Automation Research (SOAR) to address some of these issues in a complex airport environment. The concept is enabled by advanced technologies envisioned for the 2020 time frame. It involves surface traffic management (STM) automation to aid tower operation, and flight-deck automation to help execute clearances generated by the STM automation for efficient surface operation. The functions of and integrated operation between these automation components are described, together with an assessment of enabling technologies in communication, navigation, and surveillance. Plans for evaluating the collaborative concept prior to full-scale technology development are discussed.

Air-Ground Integrated Concept for Surface Conflict Detection and Resolution

“…Surface Operation Automation Research (SOAR) [13][14][15] forms the seminal research in surface 4DT operations in a holistic approach to the problem. It contains a GoSAFE (Ground-Operation Situation Awareness and Flow Efficiency) 16,17 tower automation concept that allows surface operation planning including taxiway route assignment, runway assignment, taxiway sequencing and scheduling, departure runway scheduling, runway exit assignment and scheduling, and runway crossing operations.…”

Guidelines for Avoiding Vortex Wakes During Use of Closely-Spaced Parallel Runways

“…The results presented assume that the transition from a VMC to an IMC capability at airports has been completed. [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] For a number of operational reasons, success with wake-avoidance technologies will have been achieved when the safe zone for the along-trail separation distance, or time between the two aircraft, can be safely increased from nearly simultaneous (or 5 s, i.e., about 1000 ft or 305 m) to as much as 10 s (about 2000 ft or 610 m) or more. The larger along-trail separation distances facilitate wave-off operations and accommodate required aircraft-grouping combinations.…”

A comparison of aircraft trajectory-based and aggregate queue-based control of airport taxi processes

“…These approaches are typically aimed at determining the optimal times for each aircraft to reach significant control points along its taxi route, while considering the movements of the other flights on the ground. Such individual aircraftbased (or Lagrangian) approaches include Dynamic Programming-based taxi route optimization using Dijkstra's algorithm [6], Time-Dependent Shortest Path techniques [7], and Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulations ( [8][9][10][11][12][13]). The integer programming model used in this paper for the trajectory-based optimization of taxiway operations proposed in this paper is derived from prior work by the authors, using data from DTW airport [13].…”