The impact of heterogeneous arrival and departure rates of flights on runway configuration optimization

Abstract

The rapid growth of the airline industry has caused an enormous demand in the context of air transport and air traffic congestion in several hub airports. In order to alleviate this situation and resolve the imbalance between the arrival and departure rate, efficient runway usage in airport capacity management is an immediate and feasible solution as compared to airport expansion and runway construction. Air Traffic Control (ATC) operators could optimise their runway capacity by operating dynamic runway configuration in switch mode runways based on the air and airport traffic conditions. A semi-mixed mode runway is considered in this paper, wherein some runways are configured for either landing or take-off operations, while others are operated in switch mode.The demand for arrival and departure is subject to the passengers demand, flight availability and timings, preferred flight schedule and frequency of flight schedule service, and usually vary in different hours (peak and non-peak hours). Given this feature, ATC can reconfigure the runway mode responding to the current demand for arrival and departure and further seize the runway capacity via systematic approach. Under the semi-mixed mode situation, formulating the coordination of dynamic runway configuration planning and the Aircraft Sequencing and Scheduling Problem is proposed. The air traffic pattern in Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) is used as a test case to evaluate the performance of this proposed model. Based on the test results, it was found that this dynamic runway configuration planning and semi-mixed runway design can utilise runway capacity more efficiently. In the numerical study, the dynamic runway configuration planning achieved 71.6%% and 37.08% reduction of flight tardiness than the two segregated runways systems (two landing and one takeoff runways and one landing and two take-off runways) in HKIA.

How do full-service carriers and low-cost carriers passengers perceived service dimensions, passengers’ satisfaction, and loyalty differently? An empirical study

“…There are notable differences in the in-flight service provided by FSC and LCC (Huo, Keung, Lee, Ng & Li, 2020;Keung, Lee & Ji, 2021;Keung, Lee, Ng & Yeung, 2018;Ng, Keung, Lee & Chow, 2020;Ng, Lee, Zhang et al, 2020). FSC provides a full complementary service, while LCC offers basic flight service with paid add-on services (Chiou & Chen, 2010).…”

“…Competition in the airline field is becoming increasingly severe. Airlines should not just focus on customer satisfaction, but develop a competitive advantage as well, so as to increase customer retention rate, customer loyalty and to generate substantial profits (Batouei, Iranmanesh, Nikbin & Hyun, 2019;Lee, Chen & Trappey, 2019;Ng, Lee, Zhang & Keung, 2020). Full-Service Carriers (FSC) and Low-Cost Carriers (LCC) adopt dissimilar strategies; LCC highlights low prices and provides no-frills service (Suk, Kim & Kim, 2020).…”

Aircraft Sequencing and Scheduling in Parallel-Point Merge Systems for Multiple Parallel Runways

“…Controllers need assistance to manage the traffic in this type of PMS. Systematic and efficient sequencing can be obtained using optimization algorithms, heuristic algorithms, and so forth ( 5 , 17 ).…”

“…After the expected recovery in traffic growth, the imbalance between capacity and demand is expected to be the most significant issue for the global air traffic system once again. These capacity problems, caused by high traffic demand, lead to delays and congestion resulting in increasing interruption in services, economic losses, environmental impacts, and customer dissatisfaction ( 4 , 5 ). Inefficient air traffic management is one of the most important contributors to these problems ( 6 , 7 ).…”

“…The capacity problems encountered in the en-route phase have been significantly overcome with projects looking at issues such as the reduction of vertical separation requirements, and today the bottleneck has shifted from the en-route phase to the terminal maneuver area (TMA) ( 5 , 8 ). Many projects and studies have been carried out to systematize arrival traffic in TMAs such as NextGen in US and Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) in Europe ( 9 , 10 ).…”