An Initial Assessment of Benefits for Noise-aware Decision-support Tools

A current trend in Air Traffic Management research is the development of decision support tools to aid in the sequencing and scheduling of terminal area and en route traffic as a means of increasing overall capacity and efficiency of operation. What is emerging as an increasingly important factor for terminal operations, however, is the environmental impact – in particular that of noise exposure. Thus, “noise-aware” decision support tools are needed so that the decision process includes consideration of noise exposure levels, particularly for the population within the immediate vicinity of the airport. This paper describes two elements of our on-going work in this direction. We first present results from simulation of the effects of noise-aware decision support tools at four U.S. airports having drastically different features and constraints. These results indicate the potential for noise-aware decision support tools to significantly improve noise exposure profiles. We also discuss the means by which a newly developed noise-aware decision support tool, the Noise Avoidance Planner, is incorporating a noise figure of merit into real-time, dynamic determination of sequencing and routing information. This work complements the simulation study, and provides additional indications of the benefits of including noiseawareness in terminal area decision support tools.