Evaluation of a tactical surface metering tool for Charlotte Douglas international airport via human-in-the-loop simulation

Abstract

NASA has been working with the FAA and aviation industry partners to develop and demonstrate new concepts and technologies that integrate arrival, departure, and surface traffic management capabilities. In March 2017, NASA conducted a human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulation for integrated surface and airspace operations, modeling Charlotte Douglas International Airport, to evaluate the operational procedures and information requirements for the tactical surface metering tool, and data exchange elements between the airline controlled ramp and ATC Tower. In this paper, we focus on the calibration of the tactical surface metering tool using various metrics measured from the HITL simulation results. Key performance metrics include gate hold times from pushback advisories, taxi-in/out times, runway throughput, and departure queue size. Subjective metrics presented in this paper include workload, situational awareness, and acceptability of the metering tool and its calibration

Evaluation of approval request/call for release coordination procedures for Charlotte Douglas international airport

“…Workload and situational awareness, while collected for all participants in the HITL, are not reported here; the ATC Tower TMC duties were reduced in the HITL compared to operational world duties and thus workload and situational awareness for the ATC Tower were not useful. Additional findings pertaining to the metering of traffic from pushback in the Ramp are reported in [5].…”

“…IV. METHOD A Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) simulation was utilized to demonstrate the effects of metering traffic from pushback at the Ramp into overhead streams of traffic (described in [5]) and to gain user feedback on new departure management tools including electronic APREQ coordination. These new tools and scheduling capabilities were provided on custom displays in both the Ramp Tower and the ATC Tower.…”

Tactical Surface Metering Procedures and Information Needs for Charlotte Douglas International Airport

“…The higher the excess queue time, the lower the amount of gate hold taken by that flight. These values for the target, upper and lower thresholds were investigated and determined in a HITL at NASA Ames [8]. These target excess queue values affect the output of the metering tool and its pushback advisories shown on the RTC.…”

“…A Human-in-the-loop (HITL) study investigated procedures for the Metering Tool [8] and found that ramp managers may have RTMC running all the time, and they can enable or disable metering anytime, depending on their strategy for demand/capacity balancing. When ramp managers decide to enable the time-based metering, they could choose the level of gate holding from three options -'Nominal hold', 'Less hold', or 'More hold.'…”

“…These gate hold levels are associated with a metering value that defines the target excess queue time that will be taken in the Airport Movement Area (AMA) as compared to unimpeded transit time from gate to runway. A study [8] found that users preferred the inputs for level of gate hold to be labeled as "Excess Queue Time in AMA" and they chose 12 min as the target for excess queue time with 14 min to mark "less hold" and 10 min to represent "more hold" as shown in Fig. 3.…”