Modelling and simulation studies of the runway capacity of Changi Airport

Abstract

International air travel becomes more affordable over the years with the introduction of low-cost carriers (LCCs) in Asia Pacific. As a result, this region has seen an exponential growth in its air traffic movements. Asia Pacific has been recording faster air traffic growths, compared to regions such as Europe and North America. This is largely due to emerging markets and developing economies in Asia Pacific. This is especially seen in the demand and supply for LCCs in Southeast Asia. Changi Airport, being one of the major air traffic hubs in Asia, is facing overloaded traffic in the future due to this exponential growth. Although a new runway and new terminals are proposed and in the process of being built, the coming years could still bring a huge challenge to the airport, if its existing capacity is not maximised to cope with the increasing traffic demand. Hence, we studied the impacts of increasing LCC flights on the airport runway capacity. Different runway operational scenarios were simulated to investigate their advantages and disadvantages. It is found that the segregated parallel arrival-departure runway operation is beneficial. By simulating various operational scenarios with the projected increasing flight movements, it is found that a dedicated runway to medium-sized arrival aircraft may be more beneficial, as this would possibly enable it to have a higher runway capacity.

Optimizing The Utilization of Third Runway in Soekarno Hatta International Airport Using Time Space Analysis

“…The advantages using fast-time simulation approach is to conduct complexity and capacity research. Estimation of flight plan arrival and departure times is one of surplus for this software [11]. Calculating ROT and separation time between aircraft owned by this software well [12].…”

Hourly Capacity of a Two Crossing Runway Airport

“…The output data contain data on capacity and delays, curves of noise, engine-on waiting time, fuel consumption, environmental impacts, and workload of air traffic controllers. These methods have been studied for several years, and, currently, there are some very sophisticated software products [15,16] that can give results very close to reality when the configuration of the infrastructure is complex or an advanced design level is required [8,10,[17][18][19][20][21][22]. Level 5-models can incorporate a wide range of features (e.g., complete airport layouts, ATC procedures, airport operating procedures, runway entry and exit points and taxiways routes, fleet mix, wake turbulence classification, separation over time, turnaround times, and control tower activities) [11,18].…”

A Holistic Approach for Optimal Pre-Planning of Multi-Path Standardized Taxiing Routes

“…Although numerous studies have shown that this function exhibits exponential function characteristics [36,37], its parameter calibration requires sufficient radar or Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data to calculate the flight delay and runway holding time for each flight. When historical data are missing or incomplete, queuing models [38] or commercial fast-time simulator (e.g., AirTOp, TAAM) are commonly used for simulation to extrapolate the congestion evolution of runway traffic flow [39,40]. It is also applicable to taxiway and apron congestion cost studies.…”

“…Taking Nanjing Lukou International Airport (ZSNJ) operating in separated runway configuration as an example, we calibrated the congestion cost functions of the runways, aprons, and taxiways by applying historical operation data and AirTOp [39]. Based on the optimal flow distribution in the taxiway network, we established a MPSTR set considering both flexibility and feasibility, validated through a Human-In-The-Loop experiment using a tower simulator to investigate the influences of the MPSTRs on the controller's subjective cognition and operational performance.…”