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Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Tech Transfer

Predictor of Airport Runway Capacity (PARC)

Completed Technology Project

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Project Description

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The Predictor of Airport Runway Capacity (PARC) is a decision support tool for air traffic managers to estimate the near-term capacity of the individual runways of an airport for traffic planning and control. To estimate runway capacity, PARC analyzes historical data describing an airport’s traffic movements, operating conditions, operating procedures, and geospatial data to determine the time intervals between successive aircraft using an airport’s runway and variables that influence it. Variables may include facility, aircraft, flight plan and weather conditions. Second, PARC uses the data to construct Bayesian Network (BN) statistical models of the joint probability of inter-aircraft time spacing and the variables for each airport’s runway. Third, PARC performs Monte-Carlo simulations of the traffic planned to use each runway, sampling the BN models to estimate the spacing of successive takeoff, landing and taxi crossing aircraft, to obtain a distribution of possible runway capacities. Fourth, PARC selects a a target runway capacity from the distribution for airport traffic management. The advantages of PARC are adapting to the characteristics of the airport and accounting for the anticipated operating conditions to provide accurate estimates of runway capacity. Phase I demonstrates processing of FAA System Wide Information Management (SWIM) traceable data sources for modeling for 1-year of data for Atlanta-Hartsfield International Airport (KATL). Phase I uses the data to constructs BN models of inter-aircraft time spacing and to validate the models. Phase I demonstrates the greater accuracy of the BN models in representing and predicting inter-aircraft time spacing than a simpler single-event probability model. Phase I demonstrates sampling of the BN models for different airport, aircraft and flight plan conditions to obtain inter-aircraft spacing values to be used in Monte-Carlo simulations for capacity prediction. More »

Anticipated Benefits

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PARC could be used by the NASA Airspace Technology Demonstration-2 (ATD-2) traffic scheduling to compare the throughput implied by scheduled runway operations to runway capacity as per operating conditions. Specifically, if tactical runway schedules are constructed to meet minimum statutory spacing requirements, PARC could assess whether the resulting schedules comply with appropriate or typical spacing buffers. PARC could be used in other ATD-2 decision support and real-time control tools to support planning and management of airport runway configuration; allocation of runway capacity to arrivals, departures and crossing runway traffic; and/or metering of airport traffic for macroscopic Traffic Flow Management (TFM) or finer-grained Time-Based Flow Management (TBFM) applications. Specifically, PARC could estimate airport runway capacities for runway configuration planning, traffic metering and management, and demand-capacity balancing. PARC could be used in the ATD-2 system to assess in-trail separations of aircraft at the runway (measured from surveillance data) and alert controllers to occurrences of excessively small spacing values of low-probability, indicating a shift in the operating characteristics to be addressed. PARC could be used to estimate airport runway and airport-wide arrival and departure capacity values for modeling and simulation of traffic under different operating conditions for concept and technology research and development activities.

PARC could be a decision support tool for FAA Airport Tower Controllers to plan airport runway configurations and utilizations (e.g., dedicated versus shared, arrival-departure capacity allocations for shared runways). PARC could be a decision support tool for FAA Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs) and the Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC) to estimate the arrival capacities of US airports for anticipated operating conditions for demand-capacity balancing. PARC could be a tool for FAA Airport Tower Controllers to compare in real-time spacing measured from airport surveillance and infrastructure data to modeled spacing and alert of anomalies. PARC could be used by the airport authority, airline or airlines, or a third party to manage surface traffic in the non-movement area of the airport including planning and control of movement area exits and entries, gate assignments, departure reservoirs. PARC could be implemented as an analysis tool for airport consulting agencies to use in airport master planning. Specifically, PARC would be used to estimate the airport runway capacities for numerous operating conditions and compare the capacities to anticipated traffic to determine the need for modifications to, or addition of, runways to increase capacity. PARC could be used to compute and compare the effective and theoretical capacities of an airport?s configurations for efficiency assessment and traffic management. More »

Project Library

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Primary U.S. Work Locations and Key Partners

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Organizations Performing Work	Role	Type	Location
Architecture Technology Corporation	Lead Organization	Industry	Eden Prairie, Minnesota
Langley Research Center (LaRC)	Supporting Organization	NASA Center	Hampton, Virginia