Global Reporting Format (GRF) Application Automation for Runway Surface Conditions in West Africa

Abstract

This paper aims to design an automated Global Reporting Format's (GRF) application in order to reduce time of manual application (on a runway) of the Global Reporting Format developed by International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). A method has been used to measure and generate Runway Condition Report (RCR) automatically. The developed computing model is an autonomous and automatic application implemented specially for West Africa (and can be extended to any rainy area). It uses Arduino materials and computing code developed by the authors. Results obtained show that using that method to retrieve the Runway Condition Report (RCR) is fast, so human presence on the runway is reduced. Even though the results obtained using this model are slightly different from those expected, the actual runway conditions are not too much affected.

Non-Contact System for Global Reporting Format (GRF) Automation: Contaminant Body Detection and Depth Estimation in the Case of Rainy Weather

“…The runway surface is WET if it is covered by any visible dampness or water up to and including 3 mm depth; there is STANDING WATER on the runway surface if more than 3 mm depth of water is on it. When it remains less than 25% visible moisture on the runway surface, it is considered as a DRY surface (ASECNA) [9].…”

“…The significant growth in traffic increases runway occupation time which must be minimized by human inspections. So, as those Laboratories in Europe and in America [8] and after our first paper on the similar topic dealing with a GRF method (of ground contact measurement) [9]; we are improving our method by designing a non-contact system to complete the missing part of the work, the runway contaminant body detection and to improve the existing solution, the water depth measurement. Thus, we are interested in making the Global Reporting Format (GRF) application easier and totally automatic during rainy weather.…”

“…And they won't occupy the runway which is usually used because of the traffic growth [8]. The drone will have around only 5 minutes to stay on a runway of 3000 meters against around 20 minutes the runway inspectors currently spend on it [9]. In addition, the system is easy to use because it works autonomously.…”