Evaluation of the Impact of Large-Scale Taxiway Maintenance on the Task Load of Ground Controllers

Abstract

At airports, taxiway maintenance is a complex task affecting airport ground operations, specifically airport surface movement operations managed by ground controllers. It is expected that taxiway maintenance also affects the task load experienced by ground controllers. However, to our best knowledge, no studies were performed so far to quantify and assess this influence. To fill this gap, this research studies the impact of taxiway maintenance on the task load of ground controllers. It is essential to develop this understanding to ensure that taxiway maintenance is planned safely, efficiently, and robustly. This research uses Schiphol Airport as a use case, for which an existing airport surface movement simulator was used to model the ground traffic with a single-agent trajectory planning algorithm. To realistically represent the traffic patterns at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, the simulated model was calibrated using real trajectory data and expert opinion.
To quantify the task load of ground controllers, the well-known Dynamic Density model and a novel measure, based on controller's mental re-plannings, were used and compared to each other. Based on a maintenance scenario, simulations were performed for two runway configurations, with the aim to study the differences in task load between the nominal and maintenance scenario for different flight schedules. The main outcome of this analysis is that conflicting flows, resulting from taxiway maintenance, have a significant contribution to the task load of ground controllers. It was further found that the effects of these conflicts on the task load are localized and do not propagate further to other areas, and other ground controllers who do not have responsibility over the specific area in question do not experience this impact in task load.