Identifying Operational Benefits of the Arrival Management System – A KPI-Based Experimental Method by Evaluating Radar Trajectories

Abstract

The arrival management (AMAN) system is a decision support tool for air traffic controllers to establish and maintain the landing sequence for arrival aircraft. The original intention of designing the AMAN system is to improve the efficiency of air traffic management (ATM), but few studies are investigating the operational benefits of this system based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and evaluating actual data in a real-time environment. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a KPI based transferable comparative analysis method for identifying the operational benefits of the AMAN through radar trajectories. Firstly, six KPIs are established from a joint study of the mainstream ATM performance frameworks worldwide. Secondly, appropriate evaluation technique approaches are determined according to the characteristics of each KPI. Finally, a Chinese metropolitan airport is taken for the case study, and three periods are defined to form data samples with high similarity for comparative experiments. The results validate the feasibility of the proposed method and find comprehensive performance improvements in arrival operations under the effects of the AMAN system.

Establishing the Correlation Between Complexity and Performance for Arrival Operations

“…It is worth noting that flight distance and fuel consumption are significant ATC performance objectives. However, those indicators highly correlate with flight time [27]. Therefore, number of landings and flight time are selected as candidate indicators for arrival performance measurement.…”

“…For arrival operation, we need to focus on three KPAs, i.e. capacity, efficiency and environment [27]. Four KPIs in our previous studies were proposed which closely related to these KPAs, such as airport acceptance rate, final approach separation, flight time within TMA, and taxi-in time [28].…”