Analysis And Control Of Airport Surface Congestion

Airport surface congestion results in significant increases in taxi times,fuel burn and emission at major airport.Based on operational data,the purpose of this paper is to find the controllable parameters which can directly reduce surface congestion and develop control policy and provide suggestion to controllers.This paper firstly analyzes and summarizes the relative literature of airport surface analysis.Research on airport capacity and runway configuration suggests that it is hard to control surface congestion by departure rate or arrival rate.By choosing average taxi time as the observation of surface congestion,analysis of related variables shows that surface congestion can be judged by the number of active flight on airport surface system.Active flight number can be controlled by controlling pushback rate.Flight taxi-out process is modeled by separate the process to unimpeded taxi time calculation and runway queuing model.A new method to calculation unimpeded taxi time is proposed which takes actual surface movement into account.Runway queuing process is shown to fit the distribution of erlang distribution.Finally this paper describe a case study of a congestion control strategy which called pushback rate control at Beijing Capital International Airport to meter pushbacks from the gate,in order to prevent the airport surface from entering congested states and to reduce the time that flights spend with engines on while taxiing to the runway.Case study shows that pushback rate control can obviously reduce average taxi-out time.Meanwhile,only 2 of all flights in case study take off later than before.