Effect of Trajectory Prediction and Stochastic Runway Occupancy Times on Aircraft Delays

Abstract

T his paper examines aircraft delays when arriving flights have been assigned specific times to land by air traffic control. It shows that the benefit from aircraft meeting their prescribed times of arrival with higher precision is moderated if it is not complemented by accurate predictions of runway occupancy times (ROTs) after touchdown. A single server queueing system is considered, in which the server corresponds to an airport's runway. Landing aircraft are assigned scheduled times of arrival at the runway, which they meet with some stochastic error. The time for an aircraft to clear the runway is included as a random variable in the model. A recursive queueing model is formulated and expressions are derived for the mean and variance of aircraft delays. The analysis then focuses on the effect of unpunctual arrivals on delays and how that is affected by dispersion in aircraft ROTs. A simplified situation, in which model parameters are the same for all aircraft, shows that dispersion in ROTs causes significant losses in throughput efficiency, substantially reducing the benefit of precise trajectory adherence in many cases.

Çoklu terk ediş noktası bulunan pistler için stokastik sıralama planlama modeli

“…Even for professionals, it is not easy to predict the ROTs (Martinez et al, 2018). Therefore, stochastic approaches have been suggested to improve runway operations considering ROT uncertainties (Hockaday & Kanafani, 1974;Nikoleris & Hansen, 2016;Stamatopoulos et al, 2004). All these approaches indicate that the efficiency of air traffic management may increase by considering the ROT uncertainties.…”

Flight Delays in Germany: a Model for Evaluation of Future Cost Risk

“…Other pieces of work include the impact of fragmentation (Ansuategi et al, 2019), air traffic volatility on efficiency (Standfuss et al, 2021), climate costs due to air management (Goicoechea et al, 2021) or the assessment of airline's competitive position at the network level (Maertens, 2020). More directly linked to cost of delays several pieces of work have tried to assess these (Cook, 2004;Cook & Tanner, 2011, 2015Koster et al, 2014;Nikoleris & Hansen, 2015;Performance Review Unit, 2019). These earlier efforts have quantified the cost values for several ranges of delays in minutes under a number of different parameters and conditions but have not tried to assess or forecast total cost of the delays in Europe.…”