Coordinated Arrival and Departure Management

Abstract

At many airports, the arrival and departure demand often outpaces the available airport capacity. Therefore, the flowof arriving and departing aircraft needs to be controlled to ensure safe and efficient operations. Many airports have been implementing systems that provide electronic assistance for air traffic control in planning and sequencing the flow of arriving and departing aircraft. Those systems are called the ArrivalManager and the DepartureManager. At the moment the two systems do not take each other’s traffic situation into account. Arriving and departing aircraft are accepted to enter the same airspace, even though no information exchange exists between the two. The lack in information exchange is not problematic for airports operating independent arrival and departure runways, arriving aircraft paths do not hinder departing aircraft paths. However, for dependent runways, when aircraft arrivals hinder departing aircraft, and vice versa, the lack of information exchange between the two systems, ATC will not be able to fit as many departures into the arrival stream as is planned by the Departure Manager. This can cause severe (surface-) congestion problems at airports that rely on dependent runways. This study focused on the interaction between arriving and departing aircraft for dependent arrival and departure runway combinations and the magnitude of the resulting arrival and departure capacity interference. With this knowledge, this research developed and assessed strategies for coordination between Arrival Management and Departure Management. First, the uncoordinated Arrival and Departure Manager (ADMAN) was developed in BlueSky Open Air Traffic Simulator to represent the current management of arrivals and departures; the AMAN and DMAN schedule inbound and outbound independently from one another. Second, the coordinated ADMAN was developed in BlueSky Open Air Traffic Simulator as well. The coordinated ADMAN includes three different coordination modules between the AMAN and DMAN that aims to increase the operational efficiency of dependent arrival and departure runway combinations. Each of the implemented coordination modules checks the number of departure slots that are available in the scheduled arrival stream and intervene if necessary, taking into account different assumptions. To obtain insight into the future magnitude of arrival and departure capacity interference and to demonstrate the for a coordination mechanism between the management of arrivals and departures, fast-time simulations were performed with the uncoordinated ADMAN. This experiment used an arrival and departure runway combination with amissed approach dependency to assess future arrival and departure capacity interference. To express the severeness of arrival and departure capacity interference, capacity was used as Key Performance Area (KPA). The results showed that if the arrival load would increase, due to RECAT and TBS, the arrival and departure capacity interference worsens. These results demonstrated the need for coordination mechanism between the management of arriving and departing aircraft. A second experiment was set-up to assess the performance of the different coordination modules implemented in the uncoordinated ADMAN. The three coordination modules were evaluated in terms of capacity, delay, coordination module interventions and ATCO workload by performing fast-time simulations. Like the first experiment, the second experiment used an arrival and departure runway combination with a missed approach dependency to test the modules for different levels of arrival load during morning and evening arrival peaks. The results showed that the departure capacity could be increased, and departure delay could be decreased, when the AMAN meters the arriving aircraft as a function of the departure ground situation. As this research set the start for coordinated arrival and departure management for dependent runway operations, other concepts could be developed tomitigate the effect of arrival and departure capacity interference. Furthermore, to improve the realism of both the uncoordinated ADMAN and coordinated ADMAN, it is recommended to upgrade the Air Traffic Control module.