Quantitative analysis of airport arrival capacity and arrival safety using stochastic methods

Reduction of aircraft spacing is beneficial to increase airport arrival capacity. The main safety issues related with aircraft approach spacing include runway collision between two landing aircraft and loss of control due to a wake vortex encounter. This dissertation focuses on the analysis of their corresponding precursory incidents: simultaneous runway occupancy and wake vortex encounter. The objective of the research is to derive methodologies to quantify the runway safety and the wake vortex encounter safety, and to investigate the impact of changes in the system on the safety levels.; The dissertation begins with the analysis of runway safety and then addresses wake vortex safety. To quantify the risk of simultaneous runway occupancy, the dissertation first describes data obtained by direct observation of the arrival process at an airport. Then, it describes a detailed simulation-based aircraft-landing model to estimate the probability of a simultaneous runway occupancy. To predict the safety level under different system states, a simulation model of the terminal airspace and an analytical queueing model are developed. The terminal airspace simulation model is able to investigate the impact on safety, delay and throughput under changes in traffic volume or separation standards. The queueing model is preferred for analyzing the sensitivity of safety to separation and runway occupancy time. Following that, a method to evaluate runway collision risk given a simultaneous runway occupancy is introduced.; A hybrid wake vortex encounter risk model is proposed afterwards. The model integrates a wake vortex physics model, an aircraft flight model, and an analytical model to evaluate wake vortex encounter risk per approach. The Probabilistic 2-Phase wake vortex model is used to simulate wake vortices. The analytical model determines the encounter risk based on the positional distributions of vortices and aircraft, which are obtained through the corresponding simulation models. A toolbox, WAVERET, is developed and used to investigate the sensitivity of encounter risk to crosswind and separations.